Stem water content is crucial to support fruit tree functioning during heatwaves in a Mediterranean climate

Droughts are expected to intensify in the Mediterranean region due to climate change, yet the effect of these highly variable events on local trees is unknown. To study the particular effect of heatwaves in orchards, where soil-drought can be mitigated by irrigation, we propose a heatwave definition that focuses on atmospheric stress and its consequences, by relating the intensity of high VPD events to losses in tree stem-water storage (StWS). We found that the sensitivity and resilience of StWS to heatwaves is species-specific, and varies among species with different water-management strategies (e.g., isohydric orange and anisohydric mango trees, p < 10 ⁻³ ). Navel orange trees were sensitive to heatwaves starting at the 80th percentile of VPD in early spring, and once irrigation began, despite the harsh Mediterranean summer temperatures, StWC increased to 0.57 g cm ⁻³ , slightly greater than the StWC of the earlier wet season (approximately 0.55 g cm ⁻³ ). Oppositely, there was a net reduction in StWC in Shelly mango trees from 0.75 to 0.69 g cm ⁻³ between the two seasons, as sensitivity to heatwaves increased from the 90th to the 80th percentile in spring and summer, respectively. By first quantifying heatwaves and relating this new variable to changes in StWS, we were able to describe the sensitivity of each species according to the rarity of the heatwave events by VPD percentile, and their resilience to heatwaves over seasons based on the corresponding net changes in StWC. Though the experiment in this study was performed in a Mediterranean climate, hotter-droughts are rising globally and the framework developed here for quantifying and measuring the effect of heatwaves can be broadly applied across geographic locations.