Quantifying the impacts of land cover change on gross primary productivity globally

Abstract

Historically, humans have cleared many forests for agriculture. While this substantially reduced ecosystem carbon storage, the impacts of these land cover changes on terrestrial gross primary productivity (GPP) have not been adequately resolved yet. Here, we combine high-resolution datasets of satellite-derived GPP and environmental predictor variables to estimate the potential GPP of forests, grasslands, and croplands around the globe. With a mean GPP of 2.0 kg C m−2 yr−1 forests represent the most productive land cover on two thirds of the total area suitable for any of these land cover types, while grasslands and croplands on average reach 1.5 and 1.8 kg C m−2 yr−1, respectively. Combining our potential GPP maps with a historical land-use reconstruction indicates a 4.4% reduction in global GPP from agricultural expansion. This land-use-induced GPP reduction is amplified in some future scenarios as a result of ongoing deforestation (e.g., the large-scale bioenergy scenario SSP4-3.4) but partly reversed in other scenarios (e.g., the sustainability scenario SSP1-1.9) due to agricultural abandonment. Comparing our results to simulations from state-of-the-art Earth System Models, we find that all investigated models deviate substantially from our estimates and from each other. Our maps could be used as a benchmark to reduce this inconsistency, thereby improving projections of land-based climate mitigation potentials.

Biomes of the world under climate change scenarios: increasing aridity and higher temperatures lead to significant shifts in natural vegetation

“…Su et al (2021) modeled yield gains under Conservation Agriculture (CA) and various practices for the future climate scenarios and found out that overall performance of CA will most likely decrease in the future in most temperate regions in South 2/24 America, including Uruguay, southern Brazil and northern Argentina for barley, cotton, rice, sorghum and sunflower. Krause et al (2022) has recently modelled the impacts of anthropogenic land cover changes on global Gross Primary Productivity (GPP) using maps of historical agricultural expansion and future land-use changes based on the 25 km resolution LUH2 dataset (Hurtt et al, 2020). Their results indicate that global GPP might get further reduced owing to agricultural expansion and to extents that depend on the prevailing scenario.…”

Human modification of land cover alters net primary productivity, species richness and their relationship

“…Previous studies showed that areas currently under forestry are the most productive, followed by areas used today as cropland (Haberl et al., 2007). In high‐productivity tropical forests, land‐cover change usually decreases productivity (Krause et al., 2022), although a transition to a highly productive arable cropland can increase maximum productivity (DeFries et al., 1999; Gosling et al., 2017). However, the average annual productivity of croplands, which includes productivity across the whole cropping cycle, is reduced even though the proportion of the productivity that can be consumed by humans and livestock has increased.…”

Contrasting responses of peak vegetation growth to asymmetric warming: Evidences from FLUXNET and satellite observations

“…Although partial correlation analysis was applied to eliminate the influence of collinearity of meteorological variables, we did not consider the impact on ecological disturbance on vegetation growth. Ecological disturbances, such as insects (Kurz et al, 2008), fire disturbances (Beck & Goetz, 2011), deforestation (Estoque et al, 2018), land use change (Krause et al, 2022), and human management (Wang et al, 2022), will also greatly affect peak vegetation growth. For instance, over-grazing reduces vegetation greenness (Hilker et al, 2014), and may lead to a spurious negative correlation between peak growth and warming because temperature change in this case is not the main cause for the peak growth.…”