“…Thus, we distinguish between different functional groups through the different tradeoffs they make between shoot growth and tolerance to water stress. The plant community is quantified by introducing a dimensionless trait parameter (Nathan et al, 2016;Tzuk et al, 2019;Yizhaq et al, 2020), ∈ (0, 1], that represents a tradeoff between plant investment in shoot growth vs. investment in tolerance to water stress, so that → 0 represents plants that invest mostly in growth, while → 1 represents plants that invest mostly in tolerating water stress (see the Methods section for a mathematical formulation). Using this parameter, the pool of species is divided into ≫ 1 functional groups, where all species within the th group have values in the small interval Δ = 1∕ that precedes = Δ .…”