Rafael poyatos

Close your eyes and think of the most solid living organism you know of. Did you think of a tree? Trees are solid, still, and impervious to the passing of time, right? Well, wrong actually. In reality, the trunk of a tree beats: it shrinks in the daytime due to water loss and swells at night as it rehydrates via the tree’s roots. That beat, according to a study published recently in Nature Communications, is weakened by heatwaves.

A new study with the MEDFATE forest simulation model makes it possible to read into the effect of the mixture of plant species and their interactions in terms of water use and drought stress.