Climate change at the ecosystem scale: a 50-year record in New Hampshire

Steven Hamburg, Matthew Vadeboncoeur (), Andrew Richardson and Amey Bailey

Climatic Change, 2013, vol. 116, issue 3, 457-477

Abstract: Observing the full range of climate change impacts at the local scale is difficult. Predicted rates of change are often small relative to interannual variability, and few locations have sufficiently comprehensive long-term records of environmental variables to enable researchers to observe the fine-scale patterns that may be important to understanding the influence of climate change on biological systems at the taxon, community, and ecosystem levels. We examined a 50-year meteorological and hydrological record from the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest (HBEF) in New Hampshire, an intensively monitored Long-Term Ecological Research site. Of the examined climate metrics, trends in temperature were the most significant (ranging from 0.7 to 1.3 °C increase over 40–50 year records at 4 temperature stations), while analysis of precipitation and hydrologic data yielded mixed results. Regional records show generally similar trends over the same time period, though longer-term (70–102 year) trends are less dramatic. Taken together, the results from HBEF and the regional records indicate that the climate has warmed detectably over 50 years, with important consequences for hydrological processes. Understanding effects on ecosystems will require a diversity of metrics and concurrent ecological observations at a range of sites, as well as a recognition that ecosystems have existed in a directionally changing climate for decades, and are not necessarily in equilibrium with the current climate. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10584-012-0517-2 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:climat:v:116:y:2013:i:3:p:457-477

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-012-0517-2

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

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