The resilience of annual vegetation primary production subjected to different climate change scenarios

Rakefet Shafran-Nathan (), Tal Svoray () and Avi Perevolotsky ()

Climatic Change, 2013, vol. 118, issue 2, 227-243

Abstract: We examined if climate change in two dry ecosystems—Mediterranean (DME) and Semiarid (SAE)—would cause substantial reduction in the production of annual vegetation. Field measurements and computer simulations were used to examine the following six climate change scenarios: (1) rainfall amount reduction; (2) increases of 10 % in annual evaporation rate and 5 % in annual temperature; (3) increase in magnitude of rainfall events, accompanied by reductions in frequency and seasonal variation; (4) postponement of the beginning of the first rainfall event of the growing season; (5) long dry spells during the growing season; and (6) early ending of the growing season. The results revealed the following outcomes. a) Reduction by 5–35 % in annual rainfall amount did not significantly affect productivity in the DME, but a large (25–35 %) decrease in rainfall would change vegetation productivity in the SAE and lead to a patchier environment. b) Similar results were observed: when temperature and evaporation rate were increased; when the magnitude of rainfall events increased but their frequency decreased; and during a long mid-season dry spell. c) In both ecosystems, changes in the temporal distribution of rainfall, especially at the beginning of the season, caused the largest reduction in productivity, accompanied by increased patchiness. d) Long-term data gathered during the last three decades indicated that both environments exhibited high resilience of productivity under rainfall variability. These results imply that the response of dry ecosystems to climate change is not characterized by a dramatic decrease in productivity. Moreover, these ecosystems are more resilient than expected, and their herbaceous productivity might undergo drastic changes only under more severe scenarios than those currently predicted in the literature. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10584-012-0614-2 (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:118:y:2013:i:2:p:227-243

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

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-012-0614-2

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 ().