Dataset Information

Warm spring reduced carbon cycle impact of the 2012 US summer drought.

ABSTRACT: The global terrestrial carbon sink offsets one-third of the world's fossil fuel emissions, but the strength of this sink is highly sensitive to large-scale extreme events. In 2012, the contiguous United States experienced exceptionally warm temperatures and the most severe drought since the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, resulting in substantial economic damage. It is crucial to understand the dynamics of such events because warmer temperatures and a higher prevalence of drought are projected in a changing climate. Here, we combine an extensive network of direct ecosystem flux measurements with satellite remote sensing and atmospheric inverse modeling to quantify the impact of the warmer spring and summer drought on biosphere-atmosphere carbon and water exchange in 2012. We consistently find that earlier vegetation activity increased spring carbon uptake and compensated for the reduced uptake during the summer drought, which mitigated the impact on net annual carbon uptake. The early phenological development in the Eastern Temperate Forests played a major role for the continental-scale carbon balance in 2012. The warm spring also depleted soil water resources earlier, and thus exacerbated water limitations during summer. Our results show that the detrimental effects of severe summer drought on ecosystem carbon storage can be mitigated by warming-induced increases in spring carbon uptake. However, the results also suggest that the positive carbon cycle effect of warm spring enhances water limitations and can increase summer heating through biosphere-atmosphere feedbacks.

SUBMITTER: Wolf S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4889356 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Warm spring reduced carbon cycle impact of the 2012 US summer drought.

Wolf Sebastian S Keenan Trevor F TF Fisher Joshua B JB Baldocchi Dennis D DD Desai Ankur R AR Richardson Andrew D AD Scott Russell L RL Law Beverly E BE Litvak Marcy E ME Brunsell Nathaniel A NA Peters Wouter W van der Laan-Luijkx Ingrid T IT

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20160425 21

The global terrestrial carbon sink offsets one-third of the world's fossil fuel emissions, but the strength of this sink is highly sensitive to large-scale extreme events. In 2012, the contiguous United States experienced exceptionally warm temperatures and the most severe drought since the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, resulting in substantial economic damage. It is crucial to understand the dynamics of such events because warmer temperatures and a higher prevalence of drought are projected in a ...[more]

PMID: 27114518

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Project description:Climate change is predicted to result in altered precipitation patterns, which may reshape many grassland ecosystems. Rainfall is expected to change in a number of different ways, ranging from periods of prolonged drought to extreme precipitation events, yet there are few community wide studies to accurately simulate future changes. We aimed to test how above- and below-ground grassland invertebrate populations were affected by contrasting future rainfall scenarios. We subjected a grassland community to potential future rainfall scenarios including ambient, increased amount (+50% of ambient), reduced amount (-50% of ambient), reduced frequency (no water for 21 days, followed by the total ambient rainfall applied in a single application) and summer drought (no rainfall for 13 weeks during the growing season). During Austral spring (September 2015), we sampled aboveground invertebrates, belowground macro invertebrates and nematodes. Aboveground communities showed a significant response to altered rainfall regime with the greatest effects observed in summer drought plots. This was mostly due to a large increase in sucking herbivores (658% higher than ambient plots). Plots experiencing summer droughts also had higher populations of parasitoids, chewing herbivores and detritivores. These plots had 92% more plant biomass suggesting that primary productivity increased rapidly following the end of the summer drought 5 months earlier. We interpret these results as supporting the plant vigor hypothesis (i.e., that rapid plant growth is beneficial to aboveground invertebrates). While belowground invertebrates were less responsive to altered precipitation, we observed a number of correlations between the abundances of above- and below-ground invertebrate groups under ambient rainfall that dissipated under altered rainfall regimes. Mechanisms underpinning these associations, and reasons for them to become decoupled under altered precipitation regimes (we term this 'climatic decoupling'), remain speculative, but they provide the basis for formulating hypotheses and future work. In conclusion, we predict that shifts in rainfall patterns, especially summer drought, will likely have large, but probably short-term, impacts on grassland invertebrate communities. In particular, sucking herbivores show sensitivity to precipitation changes, which have the potential to cascade through the food chain and affect higher trophic levels.

Dataset Information

Warm spring reduced carbon cycle impact of the 2012 US summer drought.

Publications

Warm spring reduced carbon cycle impact of the 2012 US summer drought.

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