Some people have been referring to these leaf traits as "hydraulics" traits, but we'd have to google those recent papers, if we want to keep "hydraulic" there. The justification is that we measured traits that reflect the function of the plant water transport system especially in response to drought. We don't measure hydraulic conductance or its vulnerability, but other important traits, and besides, these traits also tend to correlate with vulnerability of leaves and stem (Bartlett 2017 PNAS).
Overall, suggest we could be more precise by refering to them as "leaf drought tolerance traits". This is definitely preferred over "water relations" traits, because the latter often also means the water status of the plant (e.g., leaf water potential, relative water content), which are snapshots of plant properties that are dynamic over minutes, hours and days. Here we are not concerned with indicators of water status, but instead with species' traits (that would influence water transport, water status and vital rates of species in response to environmental conditions).
From Lawren:
Some people have been referring to these leaf traits as "hydraulics" traits, but we'd have to google those recent papers, if we want to keep "hydraulic" there. The justification is that we measured traits that reflect the function of the plant water transport system especially in response to drought. We don't measure hydraulic conductance or its vulnerability, but other important traits, and besides, these traits also tend to correlate with vulnerability of leaves and stem (Bartlett 2017 PNAS).
Overall, suggest we could be more precise by refering to them as "leaf drought tolerance traits". This is definitely preferred over "water relations" traits, because the latter often also means the water status of the plant (e.g., leaf water potential, relative water content), which are snapshots of plant properties that are dynamic over minutes, hours and days. Here we are not concerned with indicators of water status, but instead with species' traits (that would influence water transport, water status and vital rates of species in response to environmental conditions).