Drought and ecosystem carbon cycling

Molen, M. K. van der; Dolman, A. J.; Ciais, Philippe; Eglin, Thomas; Gobron, Nadine; Law, B. E.; Meir, Patrick; Peters, Wouter; Phillips, Oliver L.; Reichstein, Markus; Chen, T.; Dekker, Stefan C.; Doubková, Marcela; Friedl, M. A.; Jung, Martin; Hurk, Bart van den; Jeu, R. A. M. de; Kruijt, B.; Ohta, Takeshi; Rebel, Karin T.; Plummer, S.; Seneviratne, Sonia I.; Sitch, Stephen; Teuling, Adriaan J.; Werf, Guido R. van der; Wang, G.

doi:10.1016/j.agrformet.2011.01.018

Cited by 499 publications

(270 citation statements)

References 119 publications

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“…To take an extreme instance, drought can even cause the mortality of plants due to hydraulic failure and carbon starvation, and thus reduced the ecosystem productivity (McDowell et al, 2008;Niu et al, 2014). The direct effect of water stress is usually accompanied by reduction of leaf area index, maximum photosynthetic rate, and respiratory substrate, and the changes in plant morphology and microbe community, which might further reduce the ecosystem physiological rates (Bahn et al, 2008;van der Molen et al, 2011).…”

Section: Biotic Responses Of C Cycling To Climatic Variationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biotic and climatic controls on interannual variability in carbon fluxes across terrestrial ecosystems

Shao

Zhou

Luo

et al. 2015

Agricultural and Forest Meteorology

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a b s t r a c tInterannual variability (IAV, represented by standard deviation) in net ecosystem exchange of CO 2 (NEE) is mainly driven by climatic drivers and biotic variations (i.e., the changes in photosynthetic and respiratory responses to climate), the effects of which are referred to as climatic (CE) and biotic effects (BE), respectively. Evaluating the relative contributions of CE and BE to the IAV in carbon (C) fluxes and understanding their controlling mechanisms are critical in projecting ecosystem changes in the future climate. In this study, we applied statistical methods with flux data from 65 sites located in the Northern Hemisphere to address this issue. Our results showed that the relative contribution of BE (CnBE) and CE (CnCE) to the IAV in NEE was 57% ± 14% and 43% ± 14%, respectively. The discrepancy in the CnBE among sites could be largely explained by water balance index (WBI). Across water-stressed ecosystems, the CnBE decreased with increasing aridity (slope = 0.18% mm −1 ). In addition, the CnBE tended to increase and the uncertainty reduced as timespan of available data increased from 5 to 15 years. Inter-site variation of the IAV in NEE mainly resulted from the IAV in BE (72%) compared to that in CE (37%). Interestingly, positive correlations between BE and CE occurred in grasslands and dry ecosystems (r > 0.45, P < 0.05) but not in other ecosystems. These results highlighted the importance of BE in determining the IAV in NEE and the ability of ecosystems to regulate C fluxes under climate change might decline when the ecosystems experience more severe water stress in the future.

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Section: Biotic Responses Of C Cycling To Climatic Variationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biotic and climatic controls on interannual variability in carbon fluxes across terrestrial ecosystems

Shao

Zhou

Luo

et al. 2015

Agricultural and Forest Meteorology

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“…In this study, we investigated the influence of droughts on NPP in Northeast China. However, drought can trigger many ecosystem disturbances (Hanson and Weltzin, 2000;Westerling et al, 2006), such as wildfires, disease, pest attack, increased mortality, or re-growth (Allen et al, 2010;Peng et al, 2011;vander Molen et al, 2011;Ma et al, 2012). Wildfire is a dominant disturbance in Northeast China (Tao et al, 2013;Wu et al, 2014).…”

Section: Uncertainties and Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of drought on net primary productivity: Roles of temperature, drought intensity, and duration

Sun¹,

Zhao²,

Wang

2016

Chin. Geogr. Sci.

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Northeast China has experienced frequent droughts over the past fifteen years. However, the effects of droughts on net primary productivity (NPP) in Northeast China remain unclear. In this paper, the droughts that occurred in Northeast China between 1999 and 2013 were identified using the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI). The NPP standardized anomaly index (NPP-SAI) was used to evaluate NPP anomalies. The years of 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2007 were further investigated in order to explore the influence of droughts on NPP at different time scales (3, 6, and 12 months). Based on the NPP-SAI of normal areas, we found droughts overall decreased NPP by 112.06 Tg C between 1999 and 2013. Lower temperatures at the beginning of the growing season could cause declines in NPP by shortening the length of the growing season. Mild drought or short-term drought with higher temperatures might increase NPP, and weak intensity droughts intensified the lag effects of droughts on NPP.

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“…van der Molen et al, 2011, for a review) by causing either ecophysiological 25 or structural changes to the plant (Schulze, 1986;Chaves, 1991). For instance, a physiological reduction in photosynthesis can be caused by reductions in enzymatic activity (Chaves et al, 2009;Keenan et al, 2010;van der Molen et al, 2011) or a reduction in mesophyll and stomatal conductance (e.g. Flexas and Medrano, 2002;Bréda et al, 2006).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…CC BY 4.0 License. control over their stomata (van der Molen et al, 2011). A soil dependent factor increasing the ecosystem's drought resilience is the rooting depth and the general availability of fine roots (Bréda et al, 2006).…”

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confidence: 99%

Impacts of droughts and extreme temperature events on gross primary production and ecosystem respiration: a systematic assessment across ecosystems and climate zones

Buttlar¹,

Zscheischler²,

Rammig³

et al. 2017

Preprint

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Abstract.Extreme climatic events, such as droughts and heat stress induce anomalies in ecosystem-atmosphere CO 2 fluxes, such as gross primary production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration (R eco ), and, hence, can change the net ecosystem carbon balance.However, despite our increasing understanding of the underlying mechanisms, the magnitudes of the impacts of different types of extremes on GPP and R eco within and between ecosystems remain poorly predicted. Here we aim to identify the major 5 factors controlling the amplitude of extreme event impacts on GPP, R eco , and the resulting net ecosystem production (NEP).We focus on the impacts of heat and drought and their combination. We identified hydrometeorological extreme events in consistently downscaled water availability and temperature measurements over a 30 year time period. We then used FLUXNET eddy-covariance flux measurements to estimate the CO 2 flux anomalies during these extreme events across dominant vegetation types and climate zones. Overall, our results indicate that short-term heat extremes increased respiration more strongly than 10 they down-regulated GPP, resulting in a moderate reduction of the ecosystem's carbon sink potential. In the absence of heat stress, droughts tended to have smaller and similarly dampening effects on both GPP and R eco , and, hence, often resulted in neutral NEP responses. The combination of drought and heat typically led to a strong decrease in GPP, whereas heat and drought impacts on respiration partially offset each other. Taken together, compound heat and drought events led to the strongest C sink reduction compared to any single-factor extreme. A key insight of this paper, however, is that duration matters most: 15 for heat stress during droughts, the magnitude of impacts systematically increased with duration, whereas under heat stress without drought, the response of R eco over time turned from an initial increase to a down-regulation after about two weeks.This confirms earlier theories that not only the magnitude but also the duration of an extreme event determines its impact. Our study corroborates the results of several local site-level case studies, but as a novelty generalizes these findings at the global scale. Specifically, we find that the different response functions of the two antipodal land-atmosphere fluxes GPP and R eco can 20 also result in increasing NEP during certain extreme conditions. Apparently counterintuitive findings of this kind bear great potential for scrutinizing the mechanisms implemented in state-of-the-art terrestrial biosphere models and provide a benchmark for future model development and testing.

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Drought and ecosystem carbon cycling

Cited by 499 publications

References 119 publications

Biotic and climatic controls on interannual variability in carbon fluxes across terrestrial ecosystems

Biotic and climatic controls on interannual variability in carbon fluxes across terrestrial ecosystems

Effects of drought on net primary productivity: Roles of temperature, drought intensity, and duration

Impacts of droughts and extreme temperature events on gross primary production and ecosystem respiration: a systematic assessment across ecosystems and climate zones

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