Universality of ecological memory for local and global net ecosystem exchange, atmospheric CO2, and sea surface temperature

Abstract

Modeling global net ecosystem exchange is essential to understanding and quantifying the complex interactions between the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. Emphasizing the interrelatedness between the global net ecosystem exchange, global sea surface temperature, and atmospheric CO2 levels, intuitively suggests that all three systems may exhibit collective environmental memory. Motivated by this, we explicitly identified a collective memory function and showed a similar non-Markovian stochastic behavior for these systems exhibiting superdiffusive behavior in short time intervals. These results were consistent with our previous analyses at the ecosystem level suggesting scale invariance for these phenomena. Thus, the observed superdif fusive behavior operating at different scales suggests the universality of the collective memory function for these systems.