Biodiversity buffers the response of spring leaf unfolding to climate warming

Pengju Shen, Xiaoyue Wang, Constantin M. Zohner, Josep Peñuelas, Yuyu Zhou, Zhiyao Tang, Jianyang Xia, Hua Zheng, Yongshuo Fu, Jingjing Liang, Weiwei Sun (), Yongguang Zhang () and Chaoyang Wu ()
Additional contact information
Pengju Shen: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Xiaoyue Wang: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Constantin M. Zohner: ETH Zurich
Josep Peñuelas: Bellaterra
Yuyu Zhou: Iowa State University
Zhiyao Tang: Peking University
Jianyang Xia: East China Normal University
Hua Zheng: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Yongshuo Fu: Beijing Normal University
Jingjing Liang: Purdue University
Weiwei Sun: Ningbo University
Yongguang Zhang: Nanjing University
Chaoyang Wu: Chinese Academy of Sciences

Nature Climate Change, 2024, vol. 14, issue 8, 863-868

Abstract: Abstract Understanding the sensitivity of spring leaf-out dates to temperature (ST) is integral to predicting phenological responses to climate warming and the consequences for global biogeochemical cycles. While variation in ST has been shown to be influenced by local climate adaptations, the impact of biodiversity remains unknown. Here we combine 393,139 forest inventory plots with satellite-derived ST across the northern hemisphere during 2001–2022 to show that biodiversity greatly affects spatial variation in ST and even surpasses the importance of climate variables. High tree diversity significantly weakened ST, possibly driven by changes in root depth and soil processes. We show that current Earth system models fail to reproduce the observed negative correlation between ST and biodiversity, with important implications for phenological responses under future pathways. Our results highlight the need to incorporate the buffering effects of biodiversity to better understand the impact of climate warming on spring leaf unfolding and carbon uptake.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-02035-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcli:v:14:y:2024:i:8:d:10.1038_s41558-024-02035-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-024-02035-w

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().