What underpins tree drought responses and how we can predict them?

Convergence in strategies and traits that minimise drought damage and promote recovery have been shown to explain favourable drought responses in trees (Choat et al. 2012). Conversely, diversity and variation, in many ways, underpin biological resilience. Biodiversity can be a marker of ecosystem resilience, particularly in the face of climate extremes (Isbell et al. 2015) and diversity in hydraulic traits has been shown to increase forest resilience to drought (Anderegg et al. 2018). Additionally, high variation in traits, even within individual trees, has been linked to species’ drought survival and recovery (Rodriguez-Dominguez et al. 2018, Cardoso et al. 2020, Johnson et al. 2022). Skelton et al. (2025) use six tree species from a South-African plant community to assess the power of commonly measured traits and metrics to predict drought responses. They also assess whether there is evidence for species convergence around strategies that promote drought survival and recovery. A natural drought during the experiment provided the ideal opportunity to test whether measured and calculated markers for drought resistance can accurately predict the extent of damage and recovery in the trees residing in this unique drought-prone biome.