Forest greenness after the massive 2008 Chinese ice storm: integrated effects of natural processes and human intervention

Sun, Ying; Gu, Lianhong; Dickinson, Robert E.; Zhou, Benzhi

doi:10.1088/1748-9326/7/3/035702

Cited by 30 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 36 publications

(59 reference statements)

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“…The map highlights the IPCC regions with the following references to the published climate extremes. References: 1 pest outbreaks Canada/North America (Soja et al ., ; Kurz et al ., ), 2 ice storm North America (Irland, ), 3 drought US (Breshears et al ., ; Schwalm et al ., ), 4 heavy storm Southern US (Chambers et al ., ; Zeng et al ., ; Negrón‐Juárez et al ., ), 5 heavy storm Amazon (Negrón‐Juárez et al ., ), 6 drought Amazon (Tian et al ., ; Phillips et al ., ; Lewis et al ., ), 7 heavy storm Europe (Fuhrer et al ., ; Lindroth et al ., ), 8 drought and heat extreme Europe (Ciais et al ., ; Reichstein et al ., ), 9 extreme drought, heat and fire in Russia (Barriopedro et al ., ; Konovalov et al ., ; Coumou & Rahmstorf, ; Bastos et al ., ), 10 ice storm China (Stone, ; Sun et al ., )), 11 fire, drought SE Asia (Page et al ., ; Schimel & Baker, ), 12 drought Australia (Haverd et al ., ), 13 heavy precipitation Australia (Bastos et al ., ; Haverd et al ., ), 14 heavy precipitation Southern Africa (Bastos et al ., ).…”

Section: Outlook: On Improving Detection and Prediction Of Global Carmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ice storms are a form of extreme precipitation that occurs when liquid precipitation (often in a supercooled state) freezes shortly after contact with the terrestrial surface. The growing layer of ice can add substantial weight to vegetation and therefore result in the loss of branches, limbs, or uproot entire trees (Bragg et al, 2003;McCarthy et al, 2006;Sun et al, 2012).…”

Section: Direct Impactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both the public media and the scientific community have recognized the widespread consequences of climate extremes such as the European heat wave in 2003 (Ciais et al, 2005;Reichstein et al, 2007;Bastos et al, 2013a), the heat wave and associated forest fires in Greece in 2007 (Founda & Giannakopoulos, 2009), the dry spells in the Amazon basin in 2005 and 2010 (Lewis et al, 2011), in the U.S. A. (Breshears et al, 2005Schwalm et al, 2012), the forest fires in Russia in 2010 (Barriopedro et al, 2011;Konovalov et al, 2011;Coumou & Rahmstorf, 2012;Bastos et al, 2013a), the Pakistan Floods in 2010 (Hong et al, 2011;Houze et al, 2011;Trenberth & Fasullo, 2012), the storm Lothar in Europe in 1999 (Lindroth et al, 2009), hurricane Katrina in the U.S. in 2005 (Chambers et al, 2007), or the ice storm in southern and central China in 2008 (Stone, 2008;Sun et al, 2012), and the 2010-2011 La Nina rains over Australia (Boening et al, 2012;Poulter et al, 2014). These documented recent events demonstrate the massive impacts climate extremes can have on harvests, economies and human health, as well as on the carbon balance of terrestrial ecosystems (IPCC, 2012;Reichstein et al, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Effects of climate extremes on the terrestrial carbon cycle: concepts, processes and potential future impacts

Frank

Reichstein

Bahn

et al. 2015

Global Change Biology

708

553

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Extreme droughts, heat waves, frosts, precipitation, wind storms and other climate extremes may impact the structure, composition and functioning of terrestrial ecosystems, and thus carbon cycling and its feedbacks to the climate system. Yet, the interconnected avenues through which climate extremes drive ecological and physiological processes and alter the carbon balance are poorly understood. Here, we review the literature on carbon cycle relevant responses of ecosystems to extreme climatic events. Given that impacts of climate extremes are considered disturbances, we assume the respective general disturbance-induced mechanisms and processes to also operate in an extreme context. The paucity of well-defined studies currently renders a quantitative meta-analysis impossible, but permits us to develop a deductive framework for identifying the main mechanisms (and coupling thereof) through which climate extremes may act on the carbon cycle. We find that ecosystem responses can exceed the duration of the climate impacts via lagged effects on the carbon cycle. The expected regional impacts of future climate extremes will depend on changes in the probability and severity of their occurrence, on the compound effects and timing of different climate extremes, and on the vulnerability of each land-cover type modulated by management. Although processes and sensitivities differ among biomes, based on expert opinion, we expect forests to exhibit the largest net effect of extremes due to their large carbon pools and fluxes, potentially large indirect and lagged impacts, and long recovery time to regain previous stocks. At the global scale, we presume that droughts have the strongest and most widespread effects on terrestrial carbon cycling. Comparing impacts of climate extremes identified via remote sensing vs. ground-based observational case studies reveals that many regions in the (sub-)tropics are understudied. Hence, regional investigations are needed to allow a global upscaling of the impacts of climate extremes on global carbon-climate feedbacks.

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Section: Outlook: On Improving Detection and Prediction Of Global Carmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Direct Impactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Effects of climate extremes on the terrestrial carbon cycle: concepts, processes and potential future impacts

Frank

Reichstein

Bahn

et al. 2015

Global Change Biology

708

553

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Fires have an immediate and large impact on carbon stocks and vegetation structure (Westerling et al, 2006;Field et al, 2009). Ice storms and frost may cause physical damage up to whole-stand destruction (Irland, 2000;Sun et al, 2012). Hence, it is a major challenge to design an analytic approach that consistently quantifies the diverse impacts of climate extremes on the terrestrial biosphere.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extreme events in gross primary production: a characterization across continents

et al. 2014

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Abstract. Climate extremes can affect the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems, for instance via a reduction of the photosynthetic capacity or alterations of respiratory processes. Yet the dominant regional and seasonal effects of hydrometeorological extremes are still not well documented and in the focus of this paper. Specifically, we quantify and characterize the role of large spatiotemporal extreme events in gross primary production (GPP) as triggers of continental anomalies. We also investigate seasonal dynamics of extreme impacts on continental GPP anomalies. We find that the 50 largest positive extremes (i.e., statistically unusual increases in carbon uptake rates) and negative extremes (i.e., statistically unusual decreases in carbon uptake rates) on each continent can explain most of the continental variation in GPP, which is in line with previous results obtained at the global scale. We show that negative extremes are larger than positive ones and demonstrate that this asymmetry is particularly strong in South America and Europe. Our analysis indicates that the overall impacts and the spatial extents of GPP extremes are power-law distributed with exponents that vary little across continents. Moreover, we show that on all continents and for all data sets the spatial extents play a more important role for the overall impact of GPP extremes compared to the durations or maximal GPP. An analysis of possible causes across continents indicates that most negative extremes in GPP can be attributed clearly to water scarcity, whereas extreme temperatures play a secondary role. However, for Europe, South America and Oceania we also identify fire as an important driver. Our findings are consistent with remote sensing products. An independent validation against a literature survey on specific extreme events supports our results to a large extent.

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“…Terrestrial surface vegetation damage is normally caused by various natural hazards, such as wildfire (Di Mauro et al 2014;Vlassova et al 2014), insect outbreaks (Neigh et al 2014), hurricanes (Lam et al 2011), floods (Powell et al 2014), droughts (Horion et al 2014;Vicente-Serrano et al 2013), ice and snow storms (Chen and Sun 2010;Sun et al 2012), and earthquakes (Wang et al 2014;Xu et al 2014). Vegetation damage can result in losing terrestrial biomass, increasing the carbon dioxide emission, changing land surface albedo, and further influence global warming (Running 2008;Sivakumar and Christakos 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A MODIS-based method for detecting large-scale vegetation disturbance due to natural hazards: a case study of Wenchuan earthquake stricken regions in China

Sun

2015

Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess

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In the global carbon cycle, terrestrial biomass plays an important role in both as a sink and source. To evaluate biomass variation due to various natural hazards, it is necessary to detect the location, extent and duration of vegetation disturbance at a large spatial scale with an efficient method. This study contributes to develop such a method, and only the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) MOD13Q1 enhanced vegetation index (EVI) products are used to generate a continuous vegetation damage index (CVDI) for detecting severe vegetation disturbance in large areas. To verify the performance of this new index, this study takes the identification of the vegetation damage due to the Wenchuan earthquake in China occurred on 12 May 2008 as a case study. This study calculates the CVDI for the earthquake stricken areas, and delineates the regions with considerable EVI abnormal variation. The study result reveals that those delineated regions with severe vegetation damage are normally consistent with the areas with the landslides caused by the earthquake. Moreover, according to the changes of other vegetation-related MODIS datasets since 12 May 2008, this study discloses that the EVI value in most of the areas, where the vegetation was damaged due to the earthquake, has not reached to the normal value in 2012, which is 4 years after the earthquake. Finally, to validate the vegetation damage areas determined by CVDI method, the high resolution images and field survey information are used. This study confirms that CVDI method can effectively delineate large-scale terrestrial biomass disturbance due to the earthquake and can accurately identify the vegetation recovery process.

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Forest greenness after the massive 2008 Chinese ice storm: integrated effects of natural processes and human intervention

Cited by 30 publications

References 36 publications

Effects of climate extremes on the terrestrial carbon cycle: concepts, processes and potential future impacts

Effects of climate extremes on the terrestrial carbon cycle: concepts, processes and potential future impacts

Extreme events in gross primary production: a characterization across continents

A MODIS-based method for detecting large-scale vegetation disturbance due to natural hazards: a case study of Wenchuan earthquake stricken regions in China

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