Long‐term changes in forest response to extreme atmospheric dryness
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Date
2023-09
Publication Type
Journal Article
ETH Bibliography
yes
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Abstract
Atmospheric dryness, as indicated by vapor pressure deficit (VPD), has a strong influence on forest greenhouse gas exchange with the atmosphere. In this study, we used long-term (10–30 years) net ecosystem productivity (NEP) measurements from 60 forest sites across the world (1003 site-years) to quantify long-term changes in forest NEP resistance and NEP recovery in response to extreme atmospheric dryness. We tested two hypotheses: first, across sites differences in NEP resistance and NEP recovery of forests will depend on both the biophysical characteristics (i.e., leaf area index [LAI] and forest type) of the forest as well as on the local meteorological conditions of the site (i.e., mean VPD of the site), and second, forests experiencing an increasing trend in frequency and intensity of extreme dryness will show an increasing trend in NEP resistance and NEP recovery over time due to emergence of long-term ecological stress memory. We used a data-driven statistical learning approach to quantify NEP resistance and NEP recovery over multiple years. Our results showed that forest types, LAI, and median local VPD conditions explained over 50% of variance in both NEP resistance and NEP recovery, with drier sites showing higher NEP resistance and NEP recovery compared to sites with less atmospheric dryness. The impact of extreme atmospheric dryness events on NEP lasted for up to 3 days following most severe extreme events in most forests, indicated by an NEP recovery of less than 100%. We rejected our second hypothesis as we found no consistent relationship between trends of extreme VPD with trends in NEP resistance and NEP recovery across different forest sites, thus an increase in atmospheric dryness as it is predicted might not increase the resistance or recovery of forests in terms of NEP.
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published
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Journal / series
Volume
29 (18)
Pages / Article No.
5379 - 5396
Publisher
Wiley-Blackwell
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Edition / version
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Date collected
Date created
Subject
Eddy covariance; Net ecosystem productivity; Random forest; Recovery; Resistance; VPD
Organisational unit
03648 - Buchmann, Nina / Buchmann, Nina
Notes
Funding
ETH-27 19-1 - Forest Vulnerability to Extreme and Repeated Climatic Stress (FEVER) (ETHZ)
198094 - Unravel the changing contributions of abiotic vs. biotic drivers of ecosystem gas exchange under weather extremes (SNF)
198227 - ICOS-CH Phase 3 (SNF)
198094 - Unravel the changing contributions of abiotic vs. biotic drivers of ecosystem gas exchange under weather extremes (SNF)
198227 - ICOS-CH Phase 3 (SNF)