DOI: 10.5061/dryad.cs1h4
title: Data from: Can intercropping with the world’s three major beverage plants help improve the water use of rubber trees?

description: The dramatic expansion of rubber plantations in mainland South-East Asia
 and south-west China has caused many eco-environmental problems,
 especially negative hydrological consequences. These problems have
 gradually worsened and pose formidable threats to rubber agriculture,
 especially in the light of increasingly frequent extreme weather events.
 Although rubber-based agroforestry systems are regarded as the best
 solution for improving the sustainability of rubber agriculture and
 environmental conservation, plant water use and related interactions have
 rarely been examined in such systems. We primarily used stable isotope
 (δD, δ18O and δ13C) methods to test whether intercropping could improve
 the water use and extreme weather tolerance (extreme cold and drought in
 our study) of rubber trees in three types of promising agroforestry
 systems (i.e. rubber with tea, coffee and cocoa) in Xishuangbanna, China.
 We found that the rubber tree is a drought-avoidance plant with strong
 plasticity with respect to water uptake. This characteristic is reflected
 by its ability to cope with serious seasonal drought, allowing it to avoid
 interspecific competition for water. The rubber trees showed wasteful
 water behaviour unless they were intercropped with tea or coffee. However,
 these intercropped species exhibited drought-tolerance strategies and
 maintained lower water use efficiencies to strengthen their competitive
 capacity for surface soil water. The stable δ13C values of the intercrop
 leaves indicated that all the agroforestry systems have stable internal
 microclimatic environments or higher resistance. Synthesis and
 applications. This study suggests that interspecific competition for water
 can enhance the water use efficiency of drought-avoidance plants (i.e.
 rubber trees) and lead to complementarity between the root distributions
 of plants in rubber agroforestry systems (i.e. rubber with tea, coffee and
 cocoa). All agroforestry systems have higher resistance, but tea was the
 most suitable intercrop in terms of water use because the interspecific
 competition for water was moderate and the agroforestry system retained
 much more soil water and improved the water use efficiency of the rubber
 tree. Considering the root characteristics of the tea trees, we suggest
 that the crops selected for intercropping with rubber trees should have a
 relatively fixed water use pattern, short lateral roots and a moderate
 amount of fine roots that overlap with the roots of the rubber trees in
 the shallow soil layer.
description: Raw data on
 climate,plant and soilThis dataset includes
 all raw data that collected throughout experiments. Data relating to
 figure 1 to 4 is on separate worksheets (i.e. climate, plant and soil).
 All information relating to methodology, abbreviations and data collection
 are within the associated paper.rawdata.xlsxSummary statistics from MixSIAR modelThis dataset mainly includes the data relating to figure 5. It shows the result of MixSIAR model. Time 1 represents August 24, 2013; Time 2 represents November 23, 2013; Time 3 represents January 19, 2014; Time 4 represents March 10, 2014; Time 5 represents May 5, 2014.mixsiar model data.rar