4.

2 Water Potentials in Organisms and their Surroundings

It is useful for future computations to have some feeling for the range of water potentials that exist in organisms and their environment. Human blood has an osmotic potential around -700 Jlkg. Fresh sweat is about half this concentration and urine is two to three times as concentrated as blood. Osmotic potentials of blood and other body fluids of most mammals are similar to these. The osmotic potentials ofcell sap in plant leaves ranges from -500 to -7000 Jlkg. Typical values for mesophytic species are in the range -1000 to -2000 J/kg. The water potential ofleaves approaches that ofthe soil at night when transpiration rates are very low. If the soil is wet, the maximum leafwater potential is near zero. In the day, with high transpiration rates, the turgor pressure is close to zero, and the leafwater potential is about equal to the osmotic potential. The variation in leafwater potential, for a plant growing in wet soil, may therefore vary from -100 to -2000 Jlkg over a diurnal cycle. When soils are saturated, their water potential is near zero, but gravity quickly drains them to potentials between -10 and -30 J/kg. The water content corresponding to this water potential is called field capacity. It is an approximate, but useful upper limit for available water in soil. As plants extract water from the soil, the water potential decreases until all remaining water is so tightly held that root water potentials cannot drop low enough to withdraw additional water. The water content below which minimal water extraction by plant roots occurs is called the pennanent wilting point, and it corresponds roughly to the water content when soil has a water potential of-1500 Jlkg. Again, this point is not exact, but sets a useful lower limit for water available to the plant. Soil near the surface is further dried by the air, and may reach potentials of - 3 x 105 Jlkg, but this drying only affects the top few decimeters of soil. The remainder of the soil profile is not likely to dry below about -2000 Jlkg. At the lower limit ofwater potential for living systems, some fungi are able to live at water potentials in the range -50 to -70 kJlkg, and there are reports ofboth plants and insects taking up water from environments which are this dry (though their internal water potentials are probably much higher). These, however, are very unusual situations. With these water potentials in mind, we now consider the effect of water potential on the vapor pressure at the liquid-vapor interface.