Category: Ecology

Summary: Estimating when pit-field coupling overcomes sectorial hydraulic buffering and lets embolism spread as a leaf-petiole-stem bridge rather than staying leaf-confined.

Plants often limit hydraulic failure by sectoriality: one part of the vascular network can fail without immediately spreading that failure through the whole organ system. This experiment asks when stronger pit-mediated coupling defeats that buffering and turns the dominant embolism pattern into a balanced bridge linking leaf, petiole, and stem.

The code constructs dense disordered hydraulic operators and uses iterative deepening with repeated eigensolves to bisect the coupling strength across larger system sizes. Instead of measuring only total vulnerability, it follows where the leading failure mode is localized, distinguishing leaf-confined embolism from a more system-spanning bridge pattern.

That makes the result a structural transition marker for hydraulic safety tradeoffs. The underlying biology of segmentation and embolism propagation is established, but the docstring identifies this dense finite-size threshold map for bridge-localized takeover modes as a missing piece.

Method: Dense symmetric eigensolves with iterative deepening and bisection on pit-field coupling in disordered xylem hydraulic operators across N=64 to 2048.

What is measured: Critical coupling threshold, leaf-versus-bridge localization of the leading embolism mode, leaf-petiole-stem balance, leading eigenvalue behavior, and bracket width.