Drought events present opportunities to study how plants respond to and recover from climatic extremes, which allows us to improve prediction of plant performance under future climate scenarios. While climate change represents a persistent, dynamic forcing on ecosystems through time, disturbance and physiological stresses associated with episodic droughts are superimposed upon this changing baseline. Key to forecasting these dynamic effects on terrestrial plant communities is understanding the mechanistic responses to both sustained and acute stressors. However, major uncertainties remain in whether, or under what threshold conditions, do plants experience reversible versus irreversible shifts. What are the controls (physiological, climatic, temporal) on whether plants can resist drought or the characteristics of recovery following drought? This session seeks to bring together researchers working across scales and systems to answer these questions and better understand constraints on future terrestrial ecosystems. Further research into mechanisms and feedbacks of plant ecophysiology can reduce uncertainties in predictions of drought resilience and recovery. New paradigms are underway in the control and recovery of the hydraulic pathway, signalling between root and shoot, transport and access to stored carbohydrate reserves, models of stomatal control, and physiologic controls on tree ring width. Particularly, the conditions under which embolism recovery occurs and the novel roles for phloem function and transport limitation are emerging research areas important to both drought mortality and recovery. Studies of recent drought mortality and recovery events at the regional scale using tree ring networks, flux towers, and remote sensing also provide opportunities to test our understanding and predictions from physiological insights. These diverse methodologies have the potential to merge mechanistic physiological research with remote observation and modelling to broaden our understanding of how plants will respond to and recover from climate change-type drought.