Effects of climate extremes on the terrestrial carbon cycle: concepts, processes and potential future impacts

By Dorothea Frank, Markus Reichstein, M. Bahn, K. Thonicke, David Frank, Miguel D. Mahecha, Pete Smith, M. van der Velde, Sara Vicca, F. Babst and 14 more. Global Change Biology, 2015

921 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Extreme droughts, heat waves, frosts, precipitation, wind storms and other climate extremes may impact the structure, composition and functioning of terrestrial ecosystems, and thus carbon cycling and its feedbacks to the climate system. Yet, the interconnected avenues through which climate extremes drive ecological and physiological processes and alter the carbon balance are poorly understood. Here, we review the literature on carbon cycle relevant responses of ecosystems to extreme climatic events. Given that impacts of climate extremes are considered disturbances, we assume the respective general disturbance‐induced mechanisms and processes to also operate in an extreme context. The paucity of well‐defined studies currently renders a quantitative meta‐analysis impossible, but permits us to develop a deductive framework for identifying the main mechanisms (and coupling thereof) through which climate extremes may act on the carbon cycle. We find that ecosystem responses can exceed the duration of the climate impacts via lagged effects on the carbon cycle. The expected regional impacts of future climate extremes will depend on changes in the probability and severity of their occurrence, on the compound effects and timing of different climate extremes, and on the vulnerability of each land‐cover type modulated by management. Although processes and sensitivities differ among biomes, based on expert opinion, we expect forests to exhibit the largest net effect of extremes due to their large carbon pools and fluxes, potentially large indirect and lagged impacts, and long recovery time to regain previous stocks. At the global scale, we presume that droughts have the strongest and most widespread effects on terrestrial carbon cycling. Comparing impacts of climate extremes identified via remote sensing vs. ground‐based observational case studies reveals that many regions in the (sub‐)tropics are understudied. Hence, regional investigations are needed to allow a global upscaling of the impacts of climate extremes on global carbon–climate feedbacks.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Mechanics of Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5ab00b84543103c4e152b2a5884628b73e2707aa

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atmospheric Science

In Global and Planetary Change

In Mechanics of Materials

Josep Peñuelas

Citations in the corpus

Global gross primary productivity and water use efficiency changes under drought stress (2017, background): “Drought can have manifold impacts on terrestrial ecosystems, including direct concurrent impacts, direct lagged impacts, and indirect lagged impacts (Frank et al 2015).”
Different responses of multispecies tree ring growth to various drought indices across Europe (2017, background): “Forests are characterized by large carbon stocks and flows, both sensitive to climatic extremes, most importantly drought, resulting in large (and potentially lagged, Anderegg et al., 2015) effects on the carbon cycle (Frank et al., 2015).”
Predicting carbon dioxide and energy fluxes across global FLUXNET sites with regression algorithms (2016, background): “For NEE, several studies have shown its dependence on long-term lag and memory effects (Bell et al., 2012; Frank et al., 2015; Papale et al., 2015; Paruelo et al., 2005) that are not accounted for by the drivers used in this study.”
Effects of past and current drought on the composition and diversity of soil microbial communities (2019, background): “Taken together, this could suggest important changes in the future functioning of the bacterial community in soils exposed to water stress, for example relating to carbon and nutrient cycling (Schimel et al., 2007; Frank et al., 2015).”