Pervasive drought legacies in forest ecosystems and their implications for carbon cycle models
Drought effects on carbon cycling
The response of forest ecosystems to drought is increasingly important in the context of a warming climate. Anderegg et al. studied a tree-ring database of 1338 forest sites from around the globe. They found that forests exhibit a drought “legacy effect” with 3 to 4 years' reduced growth following drought. During this postdrought delay, forests will be less able to act as a sink for carbon. Incorporating forest legacy effects into Earth system models will provide more accurate predictions of the effects of drought on the global carbon cycle.
Science, this issue p. 528
Abstract
The impacts of climate extremes on terrestrial ecosystems are poorly understood but important for predicting carbon cycle feedbacks to climate change. Coupled climate–carbon cycle models typically assume that vegetation recovery from extreme drought is immediate and complete, which conflicts with the understanding of basic plant physiology. We examined the recovery of stem growth in trees after severe drought at 1338 forest sites across the globe, comprising 49,339 site-years, and compared the results with simulated recovery in climate-vegetation models. We found pervasive and substantial “legacy effects” of reduced growth and incomplete recovery for 1 to 4 years after severe drought. Legacy effects were most prevalent in dry ecosystems, among Pinaceae, and among species with low hydraulic safety margins. In contrast, limited or no legacy effects after drought were simulated by current climate-vegetation models. Our results highlight hysteresis in ecosystem-level carbon cycling and delayed recovery from climate extremes.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
Materials and Methods
Figs. S1 to S10
Table S1
Resources
File (aab1833-anderegg-sm.pdf)
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Published In
Science
Volume 349 | Issue 6247
31 July 2015
31 July 2015
Copyright
Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 24 March 2015
Accepted: 3 July 2015
Published in print: 31 July 2015
Acknowledgments
Funding for this research was provided by NSF (grant no. DEB EF-1340270). W.R.L.A. was supported in part by a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship, administered by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the opinions or policies of the funding agencies. All tree-ring data are available at www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/paleoclimatology-data/datasets/tree-ring. We thank all data contributers at the International Tree-Ring Data Bank. All CMIP5 data are available at http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/data_portal.html. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups (listed in the supplementary materials) for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP,the U.S. Department of Energy's Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led the development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals.
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