A plant's perspective of extremes: terrestrial plant responses to changing climatic variability

Abstract

We review observational, experimental, and model results on how plants respond to extreme climatic conditions induced by changing climatic variability. Distinguishing between impacts of changing mean climatic conditions and changing climatic variability on terrestrial ecosystems is generally underrated in current studies. The goals of our review are thus (1) to identify plant processes that are vulnerable to changes in the variability of climatic variables rather than to changes in their mean, and (2) to depict/evaluate available study designs to quantify responses of plants to changing climatic variability. We find that phenology is largely affected by changing mean climate but also that impacts of climatic variability are much less studied, although potentially damaging. We note that plant water relations seem to be very vulnerable to extremes driven by changes in temperature and precipitation and that heat-waves and flooding have stronger impacts on physiological processes than changing mean climate. Moreover, interacting phenological and physiological processes are likely to further complicate plant responses to changing climatic variability. Phenological and physiological processes and their interactions culminate in even more sophisticated responses to changing mean climate and climatic variability at the species and community level. Generally, observational studies are well suited to study plant responses to changing mean climate, but less suitable to gain a mechanistic understanding of plant responses to climatic variability. Experiments seem best suited to simulate extreme events. In models, temporal resolution and model structure are crucial to capture plant responses to changing climatic variability. We highlight that a combination of experimental, observational, and/or modeling studies have the potential to overcome important caveats of the respective individual approaches.

Global-Scale Associations of Vegetation Phenology with Rainfall and Temperature at a High Spatio-Temporal Resolution

“…Another possible use is in the identification of places where climate change is likely to exert evolutionary pressure through shifts in competitive advantage. Climate variability represents a potentially strong extrinsic force on community composition and evolutionary force on local populations [48]. Climate factors have been shown to induce rapid, possibly irreversible transitions in community composition [49].…”

Describing the interannual variability of precipitation with the derived distribution approach: effects of record length and resolution

“…; e.g., Higgins et al, 1999;Barlow et al, 2001), the strength and persistence of seasonality (e.g., Fatichi et al, 2012), and stochasticity in weather and precipitation formation. Interannual variation in precipitation is an important descriptor of the climatic environment which directly impacts the occurrence of droughts (e.g., Dai et al, 2004;Dai, 2011), vegetation productivity in water-limited ecosystems (e.g., Knapp and Smith, 2001;Reyer et al, 2013;Fatichi and Ivanov, 2014), as well as the distribution of rainfall extremes (e.g., Groisman et al, 2005).…”

Past and future influence of climate change on spatially heterogeneous vegetation activity in China

“…Most former research applied correlation and trend analysis to detect vegetation effects of climate change, but studies on the dynamic response of vegetation activity to climate variability and the influencing mechanism were still relatively 15 weak (Reyer et al, 2013). Actually, the relationship between climate and vegetation may vary with time scales, including years, seasons, and even day and night (Piao et al, 2008(Piao et al, , 2014Peng et al, 2013).…”