The Divergent Resistance and Resilience of Forest and Grassland Ecosystems to Extreme Summer Drought in Carbon Sequestration

Jie Lu and Fengqin Yan ()
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Jie Lu: Henan Agricultural Remote Sensing Big Data Development and Innovation Laboratory, Department of Surveying and Planning, Shangqiu Normal University, Shangqiu 476000, China
Fengqin Yan: State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China

Land, 2023, vol. 12, issue 9, 1-17

Abstract: It is projected that extreme drought events will become more frequent and more severe across many regions of the globe by the end of the 21st century. Despite the substantial efforts that have been made to explore the impacts of droughts on terrestrial ecosystems, our understanding of the response of diverse ecosystems, including resistance and resilience, remains unclear. A total of 16 site years of eddy covariance-based carbon flux data were used to reveal the different responses of forest and grassland ecosystems to two extreme summer droughts. We found that the carbon fluxes of the forest, namely gross primary productivity (GPP), ecosystem respiration (Re), and the net ecosystem carbon exchange (NEE), exhibited distinct seasonal patterns with a single peak. However, GPP and NEE of grassland showed multiple peaks owing to hay harvesting throughout one year. Meanwhile, all climate factors jointly affected the seasonal dynamics in the NEE of the forest, whereas solar radiation only dominated the variability in the NEE of grassland. Moreover, the optimal response relationship was quadratic between the vapor pressure deficit (VPD) and the NEE, with the thresholds being 5.46 and 5.84 for forest and grassland, respectively. Owing to the large increase in VPD during the droughts of 2003 and 2018, the carbon sequestration of forest and grassland reduced sharply and even altered from carbon sink to carbon source. Compared with grassland, forest GPP showed stronger resistance with weaker resilience to droughts. However, larger resilience appeared for both forest and grassland NEE relative to their resistance. All analyses reflect the different adaptive strategies among plant functional types, which is crucial to evaluate ecosystem carbon sequestration to overcome future climate change.

Keywords: resistance; resilience; drought extremes; ecosystem carbon sequestration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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