Regional analysis of drought and heat impacts on forests: current and future science directions

Law, B. E.

doi:10.1111/gcb.12651

Cited by 39 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 46 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Our study highlights large differences in the magnitudes of carbon and water vapor fluxes and their responses to climate among ENFs. Our results are consistent with the findings of previous studies (Law 2014;Van der Molen et al 2011) that generalized PFTs cannot capture the differences in sensitivity of different species to climate. These results suggest that modeling carbon and water vapor fluxes of ENFs and projections of response of ENFs to climate based on the same PFT parameters can potentially cause extensive errors.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Differential responses of carbon and water vapor fluxes to climate among evergreen needleleaf forests in the USA

et al. 2016

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Introduction: Understanding the differences in carbon and water vapor fluxes of spatially distributed evergreen needleleaf forests (ENFs) is crucial for accurately estimating regional or global carbon and water budgets and when predicting the responses of ENFs to current and future climate. Methods: We compared the fluxes of ten AmeriFlux ENF sites to investigate cross-site variability in net ecosystem exchange of carbon (NEE), gross primary production (GPP), and evapotranspiration (ET). We used wavelet cross-correlation analysis to examine responses of NEE and ET to common climatic drivers over multiple timescales and also determined optimum values of air temperature (T a ) and vapor pressure deficit (VPD) for NEE and ET.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Differential responses of carbon and water vapor fluxes to climate among evergreen needleleaf forests in the USA

et al. 2016

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Vegetation disturbance from extreme heat generally reduces net ecosystem productivity and may amplify positive climate-carbon cycle feedbacks [159,163,[170][171][172][173][174], especially in coincidence with drought [173]. Central uncertainties sorrounding future extreme heat impacts on ecosystems persist concerning physiological responses and tolerance to heat, genetic and ecological capacity for adaptation, and future plantphysiology benefits of CO 2 fertilization [160,162,163,175].…”

Section: Ecosystemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Review of Recent Advances in Research on Extreme Heat Events

Horton

Mankin

Lesk

et al. 2016

Curr Clim Change Rep

339

229

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Reviewing recent literature, we report that changes in extreme heat event characteristics such as magnitude, frequency, and duration are highly sensitive to changes in mean global-scale warming. Numerous studies have detected significant changes in the observed occurrence of extreme heat events, irrespective of how such events are defined. Further, a number of these studies have attributed present-day changes in the risk of individual heat events and the documented global-scale increase in such events to anthropogenic-driven warming. Advances in process-based studies of heat events have focused on the proximate land-atmosphere interactions through soil moisture anomalies, and changes in occurrence of the underlying atmospheric circulation associated with heat events in the midlatitudes. While evidence for a number of hypotheses remains limited, climate change nevertheless points to tail risks of possible changes in heat extremes that could exceed estimates generated from model outputs of mean temperature. We also explore risks associated with compound extreme events and nonlinear impacts associated with extreme heat.

show abstract

“…At this first stage we did not consider several other ecosystem 15 specific important factors which influence the ecosystem's response to climatic extremes such as site history and detailed species composition (e.g. Law, 2014). Such an analysis should be generally possible at future stages (Sec.…”

Section: Climate Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Impacts of droughts and extreme temperature events on gross primary production and ecosystem respiration: a systematic assessment across ecosystems and climate zones

Buttlar¹,

Zscheischler²,

Rammig³

et al. 2017

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract.Extreme climatic events, such as droughts and heat stress induce anomalies in ecosystem-atmosphere CO 2 fluxes, such as gross primary production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration (R eco ), and, hence, can change the net ecosystem carbon balance.However, despite our increasing understanding of the underlying mechanisms, the magnitudes of the impacts of different types of extremes on GPP and R eco within and between ecosystems remain poorly predicted. Here we aim to identify the major 5 factors controlling the amplitude of extreme event impacts on GPP, R eco , and the resulting net ecosystem production (NEP).We focus on the impacts of heat and drought and their combination. We identified hydrometeorological extreme events in consistently downscaled water availability and temperature measurements over a 30 year time period. We then used FLUXNET eddy-covariance flux measurements to estimate the CO 2 flux anomalies during these extreme events across dominant vegetation types and climate zones. Overall, our results indicate that short-term heat extremes increased respiration more strongly than 10 they down-regulated GPP, resulting in a moderate reduction of the ecosystem's carbon sink potential. In the absence of heat stress, droughts tended to have smaller and similarly dampening effects on both GPP and R eco , and, hence, often resulted in neutral NEP responses. The combination of drought and heat typically led to a strong decrease in GPP, whereas heat and drought impacts on respiration partially offset each other. Taken together, compound heat and drought events led to the strongest C sink reduction compared to any single-factor extreme. A key insight of this paper, however, is that duration matters most: 15 for heat stress during droughts, the magnitude of impacts systematically increased with duration, whereas under heat stress without drought, the response of R eco over time turned from an initial increase to a down-regulation after about two weeks.This confirms earlier theories that not only the magnitude but also the duration of an extreme event determines its impact. Our study corroborates the results of several local site-level case studies, but as a novelty generalizes these findings at the global scale. Specifically, we find that the different response functions of the two antipodal land-atmosphere fluxes GPP and R eco can 20 also result in increasing NEP during certain extreme conditions. Apparently counterintuitive findings of this kind bear great potential for scrutinizing the mechanisms implemented in state-of-the-art terrestrial biosphere models and provide a benchmark for future model development and testing.

show abstract

Regional analysis of drought and heat impacts on forests: current and future science directions

Cited by 39 publications

References 46 publications

Differential responses of carbon and water vapor fluxes to climate among evergreen needleleaf forests in the USA

Differential responses of carbon and water vapor fluxes to climate among evergreen needleleaf forests in the USA

A Review of Recent Advances in Research on Extreme Heat Events

Impacts of droughts and extreme temperature events on gross primary production and ecosystem respiration: a systematic assessment across ecosystems and climate zones

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About