Vulnerability segmentation is vital to hydraulic strategy of tropical‒subtropical woody plants

The vulnerability segmentation hypothesis proposes that the hydraulic function of expensive stems can be protected by sacrificing cheap leaves, which has been proven to be a key strategy to survive drought for woody species from arid regions. Climate change has caused increasing severe droughts in relatively humid tropical-subtropical forests. However, whether vulnerability segmentation (measured as the differences in embolism resistance between stem and leaf; P50leaf‒stem) plays a role in the hydraulic strategy of tropical-subtropical woody plants remains unclear.
We investigated 12 key hydraulically-related traits of stems and leaves (i.e., cavitation resistance, water potential, safety margin, vulnerability segmentation, leaf-sapwood area ratio, and water use efficiency) and mortality rates for 130 dominant woody species from six forest types with a range of aridity index in tropical‒subtropical China. Our main objectives were to: 1) build a stem-leaf hydraulic framework and capture ..., , , # Vulnerability segmentation is vital to hydraulic strategy of tropical‒subtropical woody plants

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.sf7m0cgg9](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.sf7m0cgg9)

## Description of the data and file structure

Table 1: Definitions and ecological significance of 13 traits measured in this study.

Table 2: List of the 130 species with details of each site, forest type, family, growth form, and leaf habits in tropical‒subtropical forest. Abbreviations of sites and forest type are given in Table 1. Basal area: cm2 ha-1; Individuals number: no ha-1; Mortality number (total; DBH: <5cm; DBH:5~15cm; DBH:>15cm): no ha-1; *C*leaf indicates leaf capacitance (mmol m-2 MPa-1). There is a lack of basal area and mortality data for some species distributed in tropical karst forests (TKF) at PX, tropical seasonal rainforest (TRF) and tropical mangroves forest (TMF).“—” indicates missing values.

Table 3: List of the 130 species with all hydraulic traits and mortality rate. Trait...