Tropical forests of Southeast Asia have high biomass and productivity and constitute major productions for timber and wood products in the world. However, there are increasing concerns that climate change-induced increases in drought are destabilizing the productivity in these regions. Species drought resistance is a key determinant of drought survival, providing critical information in designing effective climate change adaptation measures in forestry, but its efforts is hampered due to the paucity of drought resistance data and lack of the efficient methods to assess it. To fill this gap, we evaluated the physiological and morphological responses to soil desiccation and examined their linkage to plant traits related to desiccation tolerance and delay, using saplings of ten dipterocarp species, which are important timber resources in Southeast Asia. Regardless of the differences in species, the decline of stomatal conductance occurred at low soil desiccation, followed by that of the electron transport rate, and severe photoinhibition and leaf wilting occurred finally at most severe soil desiccation. These responses were significantly different among species and species’ differences were associated with those in leaf- and stem-, but not whole-plant traits. Particularly, species that are capable of maintaining water content in their leaves under desiccating conditions were able to maintain photosynthetic metabolism and prevent wilting. These results suggest that organ-level water-use traits can be used as a rapid indicator of species drought resistance in Dipterocarpaceae.