Projections of climate change impacts on central America tropical rainforest

Abstract

Tropical rainforest plays an important role in the global carbon cycle, accounting for a large part of global net primary productivity and contributing to CO 2 sequestration. The objective of this work is to simulate potential changes in the rainforest biome in Central America subject to anthropogenic climate change under two emissions scenarios, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. The use of a dynamic vegetation model and climate change scenarios is an approach to investigate, assess or anticipate how biomes respond to climate change. In this work, the Inland dynamic vegetation model was driven by the Eta regional climate model simulations. These simulations accept boundary conditions from HadGEM2-ES runs in the two emissions scenarios. The possible consequences of regional climate change on vegetation properties, such as biomass, net primary production and changes in forest extent and distribution, were investigated. The Inland model projections show reductions in tropical forest cover in both scenarios. The reduction of tropical forest cover is greater in RCP8.5. The Inland model projects biomass increases where tropical forest remains due to the CO 2 fertilization effect. The future distribution of predominant vegetation shows that some areas of tropical rainforest in Central America are replaced by savannah and grassland in RCP4.5. Inland projections under both RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 show a net primary productivity reduction trend due to significant tropical forest reduction, temperature increase, precipitation reduction and dry spell increments, despite the biomass increases in some areas of Costa Rica and Panama. This study may provide guidance to adaptation studies of climate change impacts on the tropical rainforests in Central America.

The state of the art and fundamental aspects of regional climate modeling in South America

“…Currently, many RCMs have a nonhydrostatic core due to the considerable computational resources and the need to solve local processes with fine horizontal resolution (e.g., see Refs. and ).…”

Climate change, ecosystems and smallholder agriculture in Central America: an introduction to the special issue

“…Previous studies, using biogeography-equilibrium approaches, found reduced leaf area index of ecosystems in the region, indicating a shift to drier vegetation types . Results of a Regional Climate Model simulations and its implications for tropical forests in the region are explored in this issue by Lyra et al (2016), the first regional study to our knowledge that uses dynamic vegetation models.…”

The Eta Model: Design, Use, and Added Value

“…Studies of possible impacts of climate change have been produced to the Brazilian hydropower availability [60], to water resources considering small river basins and river springs [61], to Amazon biome and general tropical forest conservation [62,63], and to coffee crops [64,65]. Indices of vulnerability and susceptibility to climate change have been designed, for example as in [66], in order to help to construct adaptation measures.…”