Climate Drives Modeled Forest Carbon Cycling Resistance and Resilience in the Upper Great Lakes Region, USA

Abstract

Historically forests have acted as a large terrestrial carbon (C) sink (Pan et al., 2011;Tagesson et al., 2020), but their future role in the global C budget is uncertain. From 2010 to 2019 the terrestrial land sink was an estimated 12.5 Gt carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) per year (Friedlingstein et al., 2020) with the majority of this stored in forested ecosystems (Tagesson et al., 2020). However, this C sequestration capability is sensitive to a number of natural and anthropogenic influences such as CO 2 enrichment, drought, wildfires, pests, windfall events, land management, and change in land use and land cover (Davidson et al., 2012;Schimel et al., 2015;Yang et al., 2018). Ultimately the future role and efficacy of forests in the C cycle remains uncertain, especially with convergence of rapidly changing climate and disturbance.Disturbances constitute a particularly large uncertainty for forest C dynamics (McKinley et al., 2011). For example, a single storm event in 2005 was responsible for moving 0.09-0.11 Pg C from live to dead biomass pools (Chambers et al., 2007). At the same time, fires within the U.S. release about 0.06 petagrams of C per year (Wiedinmyer & Neff, 2007), and 1.8-3.0 Pg C yr −1 globally (van der Werf et al., 2017). Disturbance events such as storms and fires exhibit high interannual variability and have a broad range of biogeochemical and ecological effects. Many studies have investigated water, nutrients, and C cycling in post-disturbance ecosystems (

The Impact of Crop Rotation and Spatially Varying Crop Parameters in the E3SM Land Model (ELMv2)

“…This difference, despite calibration to the same data (Section 3.1), can be attributed to (a) GSWP3 forcing being used for the regional simulation compared to the site specific forcing utilized for calibration, and (b) GPP for all available years being used for estimating average annual GPP as opposed to only for the calibration years. These findings are generally consistent with previous work documenting the strong impact of climatic forcing data, at a regional scale, on carbon fluxes from forested region (Dorheim et al., 2022) and on above ground biomass estimation for mountainous region (Duarte et al., 2022). At a global scale, climate forcing can contribute more than half of total uncertainty in carbon cycle fluxes (Bonan et al., 2019) and can be the dominant driver of variability for the net ecosystem flux (Hardouin et al., 2022).…”