Revisiting ‘Field plants strategically regulate water uptake from different soil depths by spatiotemporally adjusting their radial root hydraulic conductivity’

Summary

The comments of Fu et al. (2026) on the paper of Rickard et al. (2025a) highlight a critical gap between the complexity of water–root–soil interactions in the field and our current capacity and ability to measure and model them. Given that New Phytologist is a plant journal, the focus of Rickard et al. (2025a) was the physiological perspective: how plants respond physiologically to spatiotemporal variations in soil water content under field conditions, while the hydrological perspective, including the method for calculating daily root water uptake, was only briefly explained (Rickard et al., 2025a). We take this opportunity to elaborate on this. In this response, in addition to addressing the specific points raised by Fu and co-authors, we discuss the complexity of soil–water–root interact