Still, the first results show that there are grasses that are incredibly drought tolerant.
We've now measured physiological drought tolerance (psi-crit) on 398 species. 13 of those were able to conduct water at pressures in excess of -14 MPa. That's more than 3% of the grasses we surveyed.
3% does not seem like a large number, but that number will only go up as we measure the most drought-tolerant species which are regrowing. 5% might not seem that high, but that'd be 500 species of grasses in the world if you extrapolate out.
How drought tolerant could some of these species be? If you extrapolate out the lower bound of the width-psicrit relationship, we should have some that hit -17 MPa (~2500 psi).
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