Biotic vs abiotic controls on temporal sensitivity of primary production to precipitation across North American drylands

Felton, Andrew J.; Shriver, Robert K.; Bradford, John B.; Suding, Katharine N.; Allred, Brady W.; Adler, Peter B.

doi:10.1111/nph.17543

Cited by 23 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 83 publications

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“…Here, we demonstrate that the well-documented sensitivity of herbaceous cover to inter-annual climatic variability (Felton et al, 2021;Hallett et al, 2019;Pilliod et al, 2017;Witwicki et al, 2016)…”

Section: F I G U R Ementioning

confidence: 58%

Interannual climate variability mediates changes in carbon and nitrogen pools caused by annual grass invasion in a semiarid shrubland

Mahood

Jones

Board

et al. 2021

Global Change Biology

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Exotic plant invasions alter ecosystem properties and threaten ecosystem functions globally. Interannual climate variability (ICV) influences both plant community composition (PCC) and soil properties, and interactions between ICV and PCC may influence nitrogen (N) and carbon (C) pools. We asked how ICV and non-native annual grass invasion covary to influence soil and plant N and C in a semiarid shrubland undergoing widespread ecosystem transformation due to invasions and altered fire regimes.We sampled four progressive stages of annual grass invasion at 20 sites across a large (25,000 km 2 ) landscape for plant community composition, plant tissue N and C, and soil total N and C in 2013 and 2016, which followed 2 years of dry and wet conditions, respectively. Multivariate analyses and ANOVAs showed that in invasion stages where native shrub and perennial grass and forb communities were replaced by annual grassdominated communities, the ecosystem lost more soil N and C in wet years. Path analysis showed that high water availability led to higher herbaceous cover in all invasion stages. In stages with native shrubs and perennial grasses, higher perennial grass cover was associated with increased soil C and N, while in annual-dominated stages, higher annual grass cover was associated with losses of soil C and N. Also, soil total C and C:N ratios were more homogeneous in annual-dominated invasion stages as indicated by within-site standard deviations. Loss of native shrubs and perennial grasses and forbs coupled with annual grass invasion may lead to long-term declines in soil N and C and hamper restoration efforts. Restoration strategies that use innovative techniques and novel species to address increasing temperatures and ICV and emphasize maintaining plant community structure-shrubs, grasses, and forbs-will allow sagebrush ecosystems to maintain C sequestration, soil fertility, and soil heterogeneity.

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Section: F I G U R Ementioning

confidence: 58%

Interannual climate variability mediates changes in carbon and nitrogen pools caused by annual grass invasion in a semiarid shrubland

Mahood

Jones

Board

et al. 2021

Global Change Biology

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“…These ecoregions were defined by potential natural vegetation (Kuchler 1964). A previous assessment of functional type cover in each of these ecoregions was consistent with expectations based on potential natural vegetation (Felton et al 2021). We split the Hot Deserts ecoregion into two to account for differences in precipitation seasonality.…”

Section: Rangeland Ecoregionsmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…We applied a multi-step filtering process to remove non-rangeland pixels, such as irrigated agriculture (Felton et al 2021). We removed 6.9 km pixels in which less than 50% of the 30 m LANDSAT subpixels were rangeland.…”

Section: Forage Production Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While the raw covariates for each ecoregion were total precipitation and mean temperature aggregated over the relevant seasons, we decomposed each of these raw covariates into spatial means and temporal (annual) anomalies and included interactions among them (Kleinhesselink & Adler 2018;Felton et al 2021). Specifically, we decomposed 𝑃𝑃 𝑖𝑖,𝑡𝑡 , the precipitation received in pixel i and year t, into the mean precipitation in pixel i, 𝑃𝑃 � i, and the annual precipitation anomaly in pixel i and year t, δ𝑃𝑃 𝑖𝑖,𝑡𝑡 .…”

Section: Historical Climate Data and Model Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The rate of ecosystem acclimation is the dominant uncertainty in long-term projections of an ecosystem service

Felton

Shriver

Stemkovski

et al. 2021

Preprint

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The potential for ecosystems to continue providing society with essential services may depend on their ability to acclimate to climate change through multiple processes operating from cells to landscapes. While models to predict climate change impacts on ecosystem services often consider uncertainty among greenhouse gas emission scenarios or global circulation models (GCMs), they rarely consider the rate of ecological acclimation, which depends on decadal-scale processes such as species turnover. Here we show that uncertainty due to the unknown rate of ecological acclimation is larger than other sources of uncertainty in late-century projections of forage production in US rangelands. Combining statistical models fit to historical climate data and remotely-sensed estimates of herbaceous productivity with an ensemble of GCMs, we projected changes in forage production using two approaches. The time-series approach, which assumes minimal acclimation, projects widespread decreases in forage production. The spatial gradient approach, which assumes ecological acclimation keeps pace with climate, predicts widespread increases in forage production. This first attempt to quantify the magnitude of a critical uncertainty emphasizes that better understanding of ecological acclimation is essential to improve long-term forecasts of ecosystem services, and shows that management to facilitate ecological acclimation may be necessary to maintain ecosystem services at historical baselines.

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“…In agroecosystems, periods of excessive rainfall can reduce crop productivity, sometimes by an amount comparable to severe drought (Dold et al., 2017; Yin et al., 2020). In many ecosystems, larger and more intense rain events can reduce net primary productivity (Post & Knapp, 2020) and/or decrease the ratio of rainfall to net primary production, especially when heavy rainfall events are separated by longer dry spells (Felton et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2013). Deficit time is the annual mean dry spell length (in days) for days when precipitation < ETo.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hydrological Intensification Will Increase the Complexity of Water Resource Management

et al. 2022

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Global warming intensifies the hydrological cycle by altering the rate of water fluxes to and from the terrestrial surface, resulting in an increase in extreme precipitation events and longer dry spells. Prior hydrological intensification work has largely focused on precipitation without joint consideration of evaporative demand changes and how plants respond to these changes. Informed by state‐of‐the‐art climate models, we examine projected changes in hydrological intensification and its role in complicating water resources management using a framework that accounts for precipitation surplus and evaporative demand. Using a metric that combines the difference between daily precipitation and daily evaporative demand (surplus events) and consecutive days when evaporative demand exceeds precipitation (deficit time), we show that, globally, surplus events will become larger (+11.5% and +18.5% for moderate and high emission scenarios, respectively) and the duration between them longer (+5.1%; +9.6%) by the end of the century, with the largest changes in the northern latitudes. The intra‐annual occurrence of these extremes will stress existing water management infrastructure in major river basins, where over one third of years during 2070–2100 under a moderate emissions scenario will be hydrologically intense (large intra‐annual increases in surplus intensity and deficit time), tripling that of the historical baseline. Larger increases in hydrologically intense years are found in basins with large reservoir capacity (e.g., Amazon, Congo, and Danube River Basins), which have significant populations, irrigate considerable farmland, and support threatened and endangered aquatic species. Incorporating flexibility into water resource infrastructure and management will be paramount with continued hydrological intensification.

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Biotic vs abiotic controls on temporal sensitivity of primary production to precipitation across North American drylands

Cited by 23 publications

References 83 publications

Interannual climate variability mediates changes in carbon and nitrogen pools caused by annual grass invasion in a semiarid shrubland

Interannual climate variability mediates changes in carbon and nitrogen pools caused by annual grass invasion in a semiarid shrubland

The rate of ecosystem acclimation is the dominant uncertainty in long-term projections of an ecosystem service

Hydrological Intensification Will Increase the Complexity of Water Resource Management

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