Plant water stress and drought

Drought is one of the most severe climate-driven threats to ecosystems and society, with far-reaching ecological and socioeconomic consequences. Effective mitigation depends on both accurate forecasting and understanding of drought impacts on ecosystems. Our group develops interpretable deep learning models to identify and predict drought events, while also leveraging plant hydraulic and dynamic vegetation models to quantify how soil and atmospheric dryness constrain evapotranspiration, reduce productivity, intensify competition within plant communities, and elevate the risk of tree mortality.

Representative publications:
Liu, Y., Kumar, M., Katul, G. G., Feng, X. & Konings, A. G. Plant hydraulics accentuates the effect of atmospheric moisture stress on transpiration. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 691–695 (2020).
Liu, Y., Holtzman, N. M. & Konings, A. G. Global ecosystem-scale plant hydraulic traits retrieved using model–data fusion. Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. 25, 2399–2417 (2021).
Liu, Y. et al. Increasing atmospheric humidity and CO2 concentration alleviate forest mortality risk. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 114, 9918–9923 (2017).

---

Warming impacts on Arctic-boreal ecosystems

The Arctic boreal region is warming at a rate two to four times faster than the global average, triggering fast and widespread vegetation shifts—including woody plant expansion, transitions from evergreen to deciduous species, and increasing forest mortality. Our research seeks to unravel the drivers and consequences of these changes using remote sensing and dynamic vegetation modeling. We focus on characterizing the demographic dynamics of Arctic boreal ecosystems in response to warming and wildfire disturbances, and assessing their cascading impacts on regional water, carbon, and energy cycles.

Representative publications:
Liu, Y. et al. Dispersal and fire limit Arctic shrub expansion. Nat. Commun. 13, 3843 (2022).
Liu, Y. et al. Large divergence of projected high latitude vegetation composition and productivity due to functional trait uncertainty. Earths Future 12, e2024EF004563 (2024).