Ecosystem responses to recent climate change and fire disturbance at northern high latitudes: observations and model results contrasting northern Eurasia and North America

By Scott J. Goetz, Michelle C. Mack, Kevin R. Gurney, J. Randerson, Richard A. Houghton. 2007

188 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Vegetation composition at high latitudes plays a critical role in the climate and, in turn, is strongly affected by the climate. The increased frequency of fires expected as a result of climate warming at high latitudes will feedback positively to further warming by releasing carbon to the atmosphere, but will also feedback negatively by increasing the surface albedo. The net effect is complex because the severity of fire affects the trajectory of both carbon stocks and albedo change following a fire, and these are likely to differ between high latitude ecosystems in North America and northern Eurasia. Here we use growth trajectories, productivity trends and regional carbon fluxes to characterize these fire- and climate-driven changes.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/311e16c86855f12669301748a457cdd7c19afdcb

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In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Tundra vegetation effects on pan-Arctic albedo (2011, background): “Concurrent increases in vegetation productivity have been observed in satellite data at the panArctic scale (Bunn and Goetz 2006, Goetz et al 2007, Jia et al 2003).”
Record-low primary productivity and high plant damage in the Nordic Arctic Region in 2012 caused by multiple weather events and pest outbreaks (2014, background): “…in on-going Arctic monitoring programmes in order to better understand how factors other than average summer temperature, drought and wildfires (Angert et al 2005, Goetz et al 2007, Groisman et al 2007, Zhao and Running 2010, Beck and Goetz 2011, Berner et al 2012) affect primary productivity.”
Ecosystem feedbacks and cascade processes: understanding their role in the responses of Arctic and alpine ecosystems to environmental change (2009, background): “…future extent, effects and feedbacks of wild-fires are poorly known for arctic tundra ecosystems compared with boreal forest (Chambers et al. 2005; Goetz et al. 2007; Liljedahl et al. 2007) but it has long been hypothesized (Racine et al. 1987, and references therein) that fire may play a…”
The response of Arctic vegetation to the summer climate: relation between shrub cover, NDVI, surface albedo and temperature (2011, background): “Photographic and satellite data suggest that shrubs are at least partly responsible for the recent greening trends (Tape et al 2006, Goetz et al 2007, Jia et al 2004).”
Tundra shrubification and tree-line advance amplify arctic climate warming: results from an individual-based dynamic vegetation model (2013, background): “…vegetation index, NDVI) over the last three decades mirrors increases in photosynthetic productivity across arctic tundra (Tucker et al 2001, Goetz et al 2007, Epstein et al 2012); transect and plot-scale studies have associated the degree of summer warmth with an increased abundance of…”