Tree resilience to drought increases in the Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

Forests in the Tibetan Plateau are thought to be vulnerable to climate extremes, yet they also tend to exhibit resilience contributing to the maintenance of ecosystem services in and beyond the plateau. So far the spatiotemporal pattern in tree resilience in the Tibetan Plateau remains largely unquantified and the influence of specific factors on the resilience is poorly understood. Here, we study ring‐width data from 849 trees at 28 sites in the Tibetan Plateau with the aim to quantify tree resilience and determine their diving forces. Three extreme drought events in years 1969, 1979, and 1995 are detected from metrological records. Regional tree resistance to the three extreme droughts shows a decreasing trend with the proportion of trees having high resistance ranging from 71.9%, 55.2%, to 39.7%. Regional tree recovery is increasing with the proportion of trees having high recovery ranging from 28.3%, 52.2%, to 64.2%. The area with high resistance is contracting and that of high recovery is expanding. The spatiotemporal resistance and recovery are associated with moisture availability and diurnal temperature range, respectively. In addition, they are both associated with forest internal factor represented by growth consistence among trees. We conclude that juniper trees in the Tibetan Plateau have increased resilience to extreme droughts in the study period. We highlight pervasive resilience in juniper trees. The results have implications for predicting tree resilience and identifying areas vulnerable to future climate extremes.

De novo sequencing of the transcriptome reveals regulators of the floral transition in Fargesia macclureana (Poaceae)

“…DNA repair and disease-resistance pathways have been found to play a crucial role in the highland adaptation of Tibetan highland plants [46,54]. In the present study, we detected significant expressions of many unigenes related to pathogen response that contained either a nucleotide binding (NB)-ARC domain or a leucine-rich repeat (LRR) domain, which were present in most resistance (R) proteins [55][56][57].…”

De novo sequencing of the transcriptome of Fargesia macclureana (Poaceae) reveals regulators of the floral transition and ecological adaptations to high altitude

“…outside the QTP) triggered the expressions of these unigenes. Warmer temperatures can greatly reduce flowering synchrony among individuals from 72 woody and herbaceous species [53]. It was also reported that P. oceanica, a highly clonal and long-lived species, massively bloomed after a simulated heatwave [45].…”

Linking variability of tree water use and growth with species resilience to environmental changes

“…Robust quantification of the vulnerability and resilience of forested ecosystems to environmental changes is essential for better understanding how climate change affects tree performance and mortality (Allen et al , Hartmann et al ) as well as for assessing climate change impacts on forest health (Trumbore et al ) and ecosystem services (Theurillat and Guisan , Elkin et al ). Traditionally, the vulnerability of forested ecosystems has been quantified by analysing how vegetation response, described, for example, with individual TRW time series or TRW chronologies, changes with environmental conditions, such as temperature and soil water availability (Lloret et al , Lévesque et al , Fang and Zhang , Serra‐Maluquer et al ). Recently, temporal dynamics of tree‐ and landscape‐level ecophysiological variables describing vegetation growth have been found to provide new insights into drought‐induced tree mortality and were used to reveal early‐warning signals of such type of disturbances (Camarero et al , Cailleret et al , , Rogers et al ).…”