Plant hydraulics regulate water transport, photosynthesis and transpiration, thus controlling vegetation productivity, carbon uptake, and vulnerability to e.g. drought and heat. Key hydraulic traits such as conductivity and capacitance are fundamental to ecosystem resilience but remain challenging to monitor and model across scales. Vegetation water content (VWC) provides a critical integrative measure of hydraulic status and dynamics, offering actionable indicators for ecosystem monitoring, agricultural and forestry management, and early warning of stress. Nevertheless, hydraulic variables and VWC remain difficult to observe consistently: signals vary from leaf to landscape, are confounded by soil moisture, vegetation structure, and temperature, and exhibit strong diurnal/seasonal dynamics that challenge cross-sensor harmonisation and validation.
This session welcomes both methodological advances, applications and validations. We emphasise developments in passive and active microwave (radiometry, radar) retrievals, GNSS-based approaches (transmissometry, reflectometry), and optical/thermal methods, alongside in situ measurements (e.g., leaf/stem water potential, dielectric probes, dendrometry) and model-data integration.
We invite contributions that: (i) improve retrieval algorithms, including cross-frequency synergies; (ii) fuse microwave/optical/LiDAR with in situ data to bridge scales; (iii) quantify uncertainties and disentangle confounding factors; (iv) integrate observations into ecohydrological and land-surface models via data assimilation and machine learning, and advance model representation of plant hydraulics, improve the coupling between the water and carbon cycles, and make use of emerging observations; and (v) use hydraulic observations and products, including VWC and related metrics, to resilience and disturbance/recovery assessment, drought monitoring and early warning, phenology, and agricultural/forestry management.
Case studies, global syntheses, and contributions providing open datasets, intercomparisons and community benchmarks are encouraged. The session aims to foster discussion between attendees from various scientific communities approaching plant hydraulics from different perspectives.
Susan Steele-Dunne, Andrew Feldman