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Plants
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Water Use Strategy of Plants in Arid Regions
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Water Use Strategy of Plants in Arid Regions

A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747). This special issue belongs to the section "Plant Physiology and Metabolism".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2022) | Viewed by 2730

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Haishan Niu

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of Resources and Environment, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. No.380 Huaibei Zhuang, Huairou District, Beijing 100049, China
Interests: water relations of steppe plants; plant ecology of semi-arid regions; drought severity assessment
Dr. Yanjie Liu

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, CAS. No.4888 Shengbei Str., Changchun 130102, Jilin Province, China
Interests: steppe plants; phenotypic plasticity of plants; plant invasion

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Plants have various water-use solutions (or strategies) for living in xeric environments. They have a set of coordinated adaptations at different levels, from the cell level to the whole-plant level, that secure plant growth under water-limited conditions. Understanding the morphology, physiology, anatomy, and ecology of plants that specialize in dry habitats has significance beyond arid/semi-arid regions since the frequency of weather extremes such as megadroughts, heat waves, etc., is expected to increase owing to climate change. This Special Issue of Plants is aimed at representing the new progress in the above-mentioned fields, and new methodology and techniques that have potential usage in related research are especially encouraged.

Dr. Haishan Niu
Dr. Yanjie Liu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Plants is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • plant–water relations
  • water-use strategy
  • plant strategy
  • arid
  • xeric

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

15 pages, 2285 KiB  
Article
Preconditioning to Water Deficit Helps Aloe vera to Overcome Long-Term Drought during the Driest Season of Atacama Desert
by José P. Delatorre-Castillo, José Delatorre-Herrera, Kung Sang Lay, Jorge Arenas-Charlín, Isabel Sepúlveda-Soto, Liliana Cardemil and Enrique Ostria-Gallardo
Plants 2022, 11(11), 1523; https://doi.org/10.3390/plants11111523 - 6 Jun 2022
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2352
Abstract
Throughout evolution, plants have developed different strategies of responses and adaptations that allow them to survive in different conditions of abiotic stress. Aloe vera (L.) Burm.f. is a succulent CAM plant that can grow in warm, semi-arid, and arid regions. Here, we tested [...] Read more.
Throughout evolution, plants have developed different strategies of responses and adaptations that allow them to survive in different conditions of abiotic stress. Aloe vera (L.) Burm.f. is a succulent CAM plant that can grow in warm, semi-arid, and arid regions. Here, we tested the effects of preconditioning treatments of water availability (100, 50, and 25% of soil field capacity, FC) on the response of A. vera to prolonged drought growing in the hyper-arid core of the Atacama Desert. We studied leaf biomass, biochemical traits, and photosynthetic traits to assess, at different intervals of time, the effects of the preconditioning treatments on the response of A. vera to seven months of water deprivation. As expected, prolonged drought has deleterious effects on plant growth (a decrease of 55–65% in leaf thickness) and photosynthesis (a decrease of 54–62% in Emax). There were differences in the morphophysiological responses to drought depending on the preconditioning treatment, the 50% FC pretreatment being the threshold to better withstand prolonged drought. A diurnal increase in the concentration of malic acid (20–30 mg mg−1) in the points where the dark respiration increased was observed, from which it can be inferred that A. vera switches its C3-CAM metabolism to a CAM idling mode. Strikingly, all A. vera plants stayed alive after seven months without irrigation. Possible mechanisms under an environmental context are discussed. Overall, because of a combination of morphophysiological traits, A. vera has the remarkable capacity to survive under severe and long-term drought, and further holistic research on this plant may serve to produce biotechnological solutions for crop production under the current scenario of climatic emergency. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Water Use Strategy of Plants in Arid Regions)
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