About the talk
Water potential gradients are the fundamental driver of water flow within and between soils and plants, and plant water potential is a key control of processes like photosynthesis, growth, and mortality that determine the fate of carbon sequestered in ecosystems. Notwithstanding this clear relevance for many critical aspects of ecosystem function, plant water potential data have historically been relatively discrete and not aggregated into accessible databases. The absence of a centralized database has been a missing link between the wealth of data on environmental drivers and plant responses that are available through other environmental observation networks and from remote sensing. Closing this gap is fundamental to addressing unresolved theoretical questions about how plants respond to drought stress, and for making more confident predictions about the fate of plants and ecosystems in a warming world. Here, we introduce the PSInet database – a global collection of plant water potential time series from 284 sites representing more than 430 species and a wide range of global biomes. We present the workflow that guided database development, evaluate its key features, and highlight the potential for this database to confront key unanswered questions in ecology, plant physiology, hydrology, and related fields.