Disentangling temporal and population variability in plant root water uptake from stable isotopic analysis: when rooting depth matters in labeling studies

Couvreur, Valentin; Rothfuss, Youri; Meunier, Félicien; Bariac, Thierry; Biron, Philippe; Durand, Jean-Louis; Richard, Patricia; Javaux, Mathieu

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3057-2020

Articles | Volume 24, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3057-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3057-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 6

Research article

|

10 Jun 2020

Research article |

| 10 Jun 2020

Disentangling temporal and population variability in plant root water uptake from stable isotopic analysis: when rooting depth matters in labeling studies

Valentin Couvreur, Youri Rothfuss, Félicien Meunier, Thierry Bariac, Philippe Biron, Jean-Louis Durand, Patricia Richard, and Mathieu Javaux

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Final revised paper (published on 10 Jun 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 21 Oct 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review Couvreur et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 20 Nov 2019
- AC1: 'Authors responses to Referee#1', Youri Rothfuss, 04 Dec 2019
RC2: 'Reviewer Comments on Manuscript hess-2019-543', Matthias Beyer, 24 Nov 2019
- AC2: 'Authors responses to Referee#2 Dr. Matthias Beyer', Youri Rothfuss, 10 Dec 2019
RC3: 'Review of Manuscript HESS-2019-543 by Couvreur et al.', Anonymous Referee #3, 27 Nov 2019
- AC3: 'Authors responses to Referee#3', Youri Rothfuss, 18 Dec 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by editor and referees) (02 Jan 2020) by Markus Weiler

AR by Youri Rothfuss on behalf of the Authors (20 Jan 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by editor and referees) (02 Feb 2020) by Markus Weiler

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (23 Feb 2020) by Markus Weiler

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (23 Mar 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have made an effort to carefully address all the comments put forward by the reviewers and have improved the manuscript. In my opinion is is almost ready for publication, given some small amendments.

(title)
I am not convinced by the new title of the manuscript. The „rollercoaster“ and the „swarm“ are not sufficiently self-explanatory acronyms to allow sense-making of the title. I strongly encourage finding a title that is catchy because it speaks for itself. Why not including the terms „variation“ and „rooting depth“ into the title?

(abstract)
The abstract still includes some sentences that are difficult to understand without having read the paper. I propose properly rephrasing. Specifically -
Line 32-33: „the variability captured by δ_tiller was spatial and may not correlate with the temporal dynamics of ψ_leaf.“

Line 36-37: The reference to hydraulic lift comes a bit out of the blue. I expected the last sentence of the abstract to address further implications, but not a completely new topic. It is confusing. Can you accomodate this?

(List of variables)
Se_j is now added to list of variables. However, please adhere to the HESS guidelines which require variable abbreviations in equations to be one letter only. Therefore, the abbreviation Se should be changed.

(Methods)
Line 188: „the right amount of plants“ - do you mean „the right number of plants“ ? Also, it is unclear what is meant with „right“. Could you please specify?

Line 222: In the response to the review 3 it says the new text would read “big leaf”, but in the new manuscript version it only says „leaf“. The „big leaf“, as in the response to reviewer 3, would be better.

Figure 2:
I think panel c would be much easier to read, if the x-axis was simply log-scale instead of plotting log(-\psi_soil)

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (13 Apr 2020) by Markus Weiler

AR by Youri Rothfuss on behalf of the Authors (17 Apr 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (05 May 2020) by Markus Weiler

AR by Youri Rothfuss on behalf of the Authors (06 May 2020) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

Isotopic labeling of soil water is a broadly used tool for tracing the origin of water extracted by plants and computing root water uptake (RWU) profiles with multisource mixing models. In this study, we show how a method such as this may misconstrue time series of xylem water isotopic composition as the temporal dynamics of RWU by simulating data collected during a tall fescue rhizotron experiment with an isotope-enabled physical soil–root model accounting for variability in root traits.