Ecological Response to Climate Change Across China From Combined Soil Temperature and Moisture Changes

Abstract

A coupled soil temperature (ST) and moisture (SM) balance reflects a synthetic climate regime, having huge ecological impacts. This paper used ST and SM data from the European Center for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts climate reanalysis‐Land and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 and leaf area index (LAI) data from the Global Land Surface Satellite Product Suite. The focus was on understanding joint ST‐SM changes and the resulting ecological response across China. The results show that during 2000–2020, 24.5% of the land area in China experienced a warming‐drying trend resulting in a 9.7% LAI decrease, while 6.4% of the area experienced a warming‐wetting trend leading to an 8.6% LAI increase. During 2015–2100, 30.6% of the land area in China will be warmer and drier, while 55.2% of the area will be warmer but wetter across three shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP126, 245, and 585). Superimposed on the long‐term trends, there are also significant spatiotemporal variabilities in ST and SM on annual to decadal timescales. The LAI also showed substantial short‐term fluctuations in both typical regions and ecosystems despite consistent long‐term increases. Our findings suggest that ecosystems could be impaired on annual to decadal scales by adverse soil conditions in the twenty‐first century, but in terms of long‐term trends, ecosystems may be resilient partly because of the compensating effects of global warming and regional hydrological changes. Impact studies should thus focus more on annual to decadal soil‐ecosystem anomalous events.

The intensification of flash droughts across China from 1981 to 2021

“…In general, ERA5-Land reanalysis soil moisture data reasonably agreed with the observations, grasping the main characteristics of variations on multiple scales in China, despite the insu cient evaluations here on absolute magnitudes due to the unavailability of the soil moisture observations layer that fully match the model soil layer depths. In this regard, the recent studies have evaluated the terrestrial water cycle components as well as relevant energy balances on various spatiotemporal scales (Li et al 2020(Li et al , 2022Wu et al 2021)not only to demonstrate the adequacy of water variable magnitudes but also to model physical process representations. Furthermore, the uncertainties in the reanalysis soil moisture data and its effects on the results were discussed in Section 4.…”