Dataset Information

Enhanced growth after extreme wetness compensates for post-drought carbon loss in dry forests.

ABSTRACT: While many studies have reported that drought events have substantial negative legacy effects on forest growth, it remains unclear whether wetness events conversely have positive growth legacy effects. Here, we report pervasive and substantial growth enhancement after extreme wetness by examining tree radial growth at 1929 forest sites, satellite-derived vegetation greenness, and land surface model simulations. Enhanced growth after extreme wetness lasts for 1 to 5 years and compensates for 93?±?8% of the growth deficit after extreme drought across global water-limited regions. Remarkable wetness-enhanced growths are observed in dry forests and gymnosperms, whereas the enhanced growths after extreme wetness are much smaller in wet forests and angiosperms. Limited or no enhanced growths are simulated by the land surface models after extreme wetness. These findings provide new evidence for improving climate-vegetation models to include the legacy effects of both drought and wet climate extremes.

SUBMITTER: Jiang P

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6331561 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Enhanced growth after extreme wetness compensates for post-drought carbon loss in dry forests.

Jiang Peng P Liu Hongyan H Piao Shilong S Ciais Philippe P Wu Xiuchen X Yin Yi Y Wang Hongya H

Nature communications 20190114 1

While many studies have reported that drought events have substantial negative legacy effects on forest growth, it remains unclear whether wetness events conversely have positive growth legacy effects. Here, we report pervasive and substantial growth enhancement after extreme wetness by examining tree radial growth at 1929 forest sites, satellite-derived vegetation greenness, and land surface model simulations. Enhanced growth after extreme wetness lasts for 1 to 5 years and compensates for 93 ± ...[more]

PMID: 30643121

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Project description:Terrestrial ecosystems such as coniferous forests in Central Europe are experiencing changes in health status following extreme droughts compounding with severe heat waves. The increasing temporal resolution and spatial coverage of earth observation data offer new opportunities to assess these dynamics. Dense time-series of optical satellite data allow for computing Dynamic Habitat Indices (DHIs), which have been predominantly used in biodiversity studies. However, DHIs cover three aspects of vegetation changes that could be affected by drought: annual productivity, minimum cover, and seasonality. Here, we evaluate the health status of coniferous forests in the federal state of Hesse in Germany over the period 2017-2020 including the severe drought year of 2018 using DHIs based on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for drought assessment. To identify the most important variables affecting coniferous forest die-off, a series of environmental variables together with the three DHIs components were used in a logistic regression (LR) model. Each DHI component changed significantly across non-damaged and damaged sites in all years (p-value 0.05). When comparing 2017 to 2019, DHI-based annual productivity decreased and seasonality increased. Most importantly, none of the DHI components had reached pre-drought conditions, which likely indicates a change in ecosystem functioning. We also identified spatially explicit areas highly affected by drought. The LR model revealed that in addition to common environmental parameters related to temperature, precipitation, and elevation, DHI components were the most important factors explaining the health status. Our analysis demonstrates the potential of DHIs to capture the effect of drought events on Central European coniferous forest ecosystems. Since the spaceborne data are available at the global level, this approach can be applied to track the dynamics of ecosystem conditions in other regions, at larger spatial scales, and for other Land Use/Land Cover types.

Dataset Information

Enhanced growth after extreme wetness compensates for post-drought carbon loss in dry forests.

Publications

Enhanced growth after extreme wetness compensates for post-drought carbon loss in dry forests.

Similar Datasets

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