Abstract
Check out our video abstract: https://youtu.be/CGzFNU70yUg To date, the
perspective of forest ecohydrologists has heavily focused on leaf-water
interactions – leaving the ecohydrological roles of bark under-studied,
oversimplified, or omitted from the forest water cycle. Of course, the
lack of study, oversimplification, or omission of processes is not
inherently problematic to advancing ecohydrological theory or
operational practice. Thus, this perspective outlines the relevance of
bark-water interactions to advancing ecohydrological theory and
practice: (i) across scales (by briefly examining the geography of
bark); (ii) across ecosystem compartments (i.e., living and dead bark on
canopies, stems, and in litter layers); and, thereby, (iii) across all
major hydrologic states and fluxes in forests (providing estimates and
contexts where available in the scant literature). The relevance of
bark-water interactions to biogeochemical aspects of forest ecosystems
is also highlighted, like canopy-soil nutrient exchanges and soil
properties. We conclude that a broad ecohydrological perspective of
bark-water interactions is currently merited.