Water use efficiency (WUE) measures the trade-off between carbon gain and water loss of terrestrial ecosystems, and better understanding its dynamics and controlling factors is essential for predicting ecosystem responses to climate change. We assessed the magnitude, spatial patterns, and trends of WUE of China's terrestrial ecosystems and its responses to drought using a process-based ecosyste...

Ecosystem-scale water-use efficiency (WUE), defined as the ratio of gross primary productivity (GPP) to evapotranspiration (ET), is an important indicator of coupled carbon-water cycles. Relationships between WUE and environmental factors have been widely investigated, but the variations in WUE in response to biotic factors remain little understood. Here, we argue that phenology plays an import...

In xeric environments, water-use efficiency (WUE) is likely to be a target of natural selection. Higher WUE is expected to confer a fitness advantage in drought conditions, but this prediction has rarely been tested. To examine the relationships between WUE and fitness, two common garden experiments were conducted. Inbred lines of Impatiens capensis derived from wet and relatively dry sites wer...

A greenhouse pot experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of phosphorous (P) fertilizers application to an alkaline calcareous soil on the water use efficiency (WUE) of lettuce cultivar "robinson" of iceberg type. Head fresh and dry weights, total water applied and WUE were affected significantly by the P fertilizer type and rate. P fertilizers addition induced a significant enhancement ...

Production per amount of water used (water use efficiency, WUE) is closely correlated with drought tolerance. Although stomatal aperture can regulate WUE, the underlying molecular mechanisms are still unclear. Previous reports revealed that stomatal closure was inhibited in the calcium-sensing receptor (CAS) antisense line of Arabidopsis (CASas). Here it is shown that decreased drought toleranc...

We studied the effects of soil matric potential and salinity on the water use (WU), water use efficiency (WUE) and yield response factor (Ky), for wheat (Triticum aestivum cv. Mahdavi) and bean (Phaseoulus vulgaris cv. COS16) in sandy loam and clay loam soils under greenhouse conditions. Results showed that aeration porosity is the predominant factor controlling WU, WUE, Ky and shoot biomass (B...

a r t i c l e i n f o In this study, we used the remotely-sensed data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS), meteorological and eddy flux data and an artificial neural networks (ANNs) technique to develop a daily evapotranspiration (ET) product for the period of 2004–2005 for the conterminous U.S. We then estimated and analyzed the regional water-use efficiency (WUE) based o...

All plants must optimize their growth with finite resources. Water use efficiency (WUE) measures the relationship between biomass acquisition and transpired water. In the present study, we performed two experiments to understand the genetic basis of WUE and other parameters of plant-water interaction under control and water-limited conditions. Our study used two inbred natural accessions of Bra...

Crop production is a process of multiple inputs (water and nutrients, etc.), and the relationships between the inputs and crop yield are very complex. This study used a model for data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the efficiency of irrigation-fertilization schemes for winter wheat in North China. The field experiments were conducted at the Xiaohe Irrigation Experiment Station in Centra...

Increasing crop yield and water use efficiency (WUE) in dryland farming requires a quantitative understanding of relationships between crop yield and the water balance over many years. Here, we report on a long-term dryland monitoring site at the Loess Plateau, Shanxi, China, where winter wheat was grown for 30 consecutive years and soil water content (0-200 cm) was measured every 10 days. The ...