Spend time in any of the world’s great forests and you’ll start seeing the trees as immense pillars holding the heavens aloft while firmly anchored in the earth. It’s as much fact as sentiment. Trees really do link the ground to the sky by exchanging energy and matter between the soil and the atmosphere. Researchers believe that understanding this connection could provide both a wealth of scientific insight into ecosystems and practical applications that address challenges such as water resource conservation and management.

A recent study led by UC Santa Barbara’s Marc Mayes investigates how patterns in tree water loss to the atmosphere, tracked with satellite imagery, relates to groundwater supplies. The results validate at landscape-wide scales ideas that scientists have proposed based on decades of research in labs and greenhouses. What’s more, the techniques lend themselves to an accurate, efficient way of monitoring groundwater resources over large areas. The findings appear in the journal Hydrological Processes.

For all their diversity, most plants have a very simple game plan. Using energy from sunlight, they combine water from the ground with carbon dioxide from the air to produce sugars and oxygen. During photosynthesis, plants open small pores in their leaves to take in CO2, which also allows water to escape. This process of water loss is called evapotranspiration — short for soil evaporation and plant transpiration — and it’s essentially a transaction cost of transporting the ingredients for photosynthesis to the leaves where the process occurs.