Forest Growth and Water Use—Opportunities for Management in Future Forests

Dear Colleagues,

Background

Environmental (climate), market, policy, and cultural changes are forcing a re-consideration of forests and their place in our society. Industrial-scale, privately owned plantations will, at least in the medium term, remain important sources of wood, fibre, and feedstocks for bio-refineries. Alongside these plantations, and sometimes in their stead, new forests with a more complex structures and species compositions are being established for multiple values, including water security, carbon storage, and wood production. The trade-off amongst these values is an important consideration for management.

Any forest management decision or action will affect forest growth and water use. The relationship between forest growth and water use results from the functional relationship between photosynthesis and transpiration and the effect of forest structure on the energy balance of forests, in which evaporation is an important process. 

To acquire CO₂ for photosynthesis, trees must open their stomata and thereby expose wet surfaces within their leaves to air. Photosynthesis, the process most fundamentally linked to growth, also creates the gradient along which water moves through trees and evaporates. The stomata, in their response to light, temperature, and internal water deficits, seem to act to maximise carbon gain per unit of water transpired, subject to the critical requirement for hydraulic safety.

Even in fast growing commercial plantations, transpiration is only about half of total evaporation (the sum of transpiration, canopy interception, and soil evaporation), and evaporation-form processes other than transpiration are also affected by canopy structure and therefore related to growth. The growth of forests is correlated with radiation interception, which is in turn a function of leaf area (index). Large canopies also intercept more rainfall but allow less radiation to reach the forest floor, thereby reducing direct evaporation from soil and litter.

Scope and Aims

While there is a very large literature on the causes of variation in the stomatal and biochemical drivers of carbon assimilation and transpiration, there are fewer studies that account for all processes of evaporation, and still fewer that quantify the relationship between growth and forest water use in a holistic way. Given the transition that is taking place in forestry worldwide, it is timely to update our understanding of the relationship between the carbon (growth) and water balance (water use) of forests. This may include (but is not limited to):

• Stand and catchment scale measurements of productivity and water balance.
• The effect of disturbance (natural and management) on both growth and water balance.
• Analyses of forest value that include wood, carbon, and water as forest services.
• Feedbacks that occur when scaling up from leaf to tree to stand and to catchment.
• Spatial analyses of carbon and water relationships in forested landscapes.

Dr. Donald A. White
Guest Editor

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• drought physiology
• water relations
• forest–water interactions
• quantitative physiology
• plantation water use