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- Title
How do plants share water sources in a rubber-tea agroforestry system during the pronounced dry season?
- Authors
Wu, Junen; Liu, Wenjie; Chen, Chunfeng
- Abstract
Extensive cultivation of rubber plantations in Xishuangbanna in southwest (SW) China hasresulted in negative hydrological consequences, particularly drought, during thepronounced dry season. Although rubber-tea agroforestry is regarded as the mostsuccessful agroforestry system for improving the sustainability of rubber agriculture andenvironmental conservation, plant water use patterns and their related interactions haverarely been examined in such systems. How do coexisting plants compete and sharewater under water deficit remains to be explored. Therefore, we used stable isotope(δ2H and δ18O) methods to determine the spatial water use patterns of both rubbertrees and tea trees in a rubber-tea agroforestry system during the pronounced dryseason and explored the movement of soil water in this system. The results of theMixSIAR model (a Bayesian mixing model) indicated that tea trees primarily uptakewater from the 5–30 cm soil layer (40.3%, on average), and rubber trees primarilyuptake water from the 30–80 cm soil layer (35.3%, on average) and absorb soilwater evenly along slopes during the dry season. These results suggest that rubbertrees and tea trees have different but complementary water use patterns. We alsoobserved that the soil of the uphill and downhill tea rows contained much morewater; however, the collaborative hydraulic redistribution in the studied agroforestrysystem could redistribute the soil water along the slope and below the ground well.Therefore, soil drought on terraces can be alleviated during the dry season. Our resultsconfirmed that the tea tree is an appropriate crop for intercropping with rubber treeswhen considering water sharing and water management and provided a practicalanalysis of water use benefits from a rubber agroforestry system during drought stress.
- Subjects
CHINA; PLANT-water relationships; TEA; WATER use; RUBBER plantations; WATER management; SOIL moisture
- Publication
Geophysical Research Abstracts, 2019, Vol 21, p1
- ISSN
1029-7006
- Publication type
Article