Temperature sensitivity of drought-induced tree mortality portends increased regional die-off under global-change-type drought

By H. Adams, M. Guardiola-Claramonte, G. Barron‐Gafford, J. Villegas, D. Breshears, C. Zou, Peter Troch, T. Huxman. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009

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Large-scale biogeographical shifts in vegetation are predicted in response to the altered precipitation and temperature regimes associated with global climate change. Vegetation shifts have profound ecological impacts and are an important climate-ecosystem feedback through their alteration of carbon, water, and energy exchanges of the land surface. Of particular concern is the potential for warmer temperatures to compound the effects of increasingly severe droughts by triggering widespread vegetation shifts via woody plant mortality. The sensitivity of tree mortality to temperature is dependent on which of 2 non-mutually-exclusive mechanisms predominates—temperature-sensitive carbon starvation in response to a period of protracted water stress or temperature-insensitive sudden hydraulic failure under extreme water stress (cavitation). Here we show that experimentally induced warmer temperatures (≈4 °C) shortened the time to drought-induced mortality in Pinus edulis (piñon shortened pine) trees by nearly a third, with temperature-dependent differences in cumulative respiration costs implicating carbon starvation as the primary mechanism of mortality. Extrapolating this temperature effect to the historic frequency of water deficit in the southwestern United States predicts a 5-fold increase in the frequency of regional-scale tree die-off events for this species due to temperature alone. Projected increases in drought frequency due to changes in precipitation and increases in stress from biotic agents (e.g., bark beetles) would further exacerbate mortality. Our results demonstrate the mechanism by which warmer temperatures have exacerbated recent regional die-off events and background mortality rates. Because of pervasive projected increases in temperature, our results portend widespread increases in the extent and frequency of vegetation die-off.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6475d0f1f896d68ab04c8a450971738d7b7ba859

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Citations in the corpus

Response of vegetation to drought time-scales across global land biomes (2012, background): “Differences in the physiological response of plant species to drought determine different levels of resistance and resilience to water deficits (9, 10) and ultimately influence the type of impact of a drought, differentiating those that slow growth (11) or reduce greenness (12), those that lead to l”
Carbon dynamics in trees: feast or famine? (2012, background): “For instance, Adams et al. (2009) attributed the earlier death of trees subjected to drought and high temperature (which imposed an increased respiratory demand) relative to trees subjected to drought only to a depletion of stored reserves.”
How do trees die? A test of the hydraulic failure and carbon starvation hypotheses (2013, background): “Mechanisms of vegetation mortality during drought and their impact on survival, however, are strongly debated due to a lack of direct tests (Adams et al. 2009; McDowell & Sevanto 2010; Sala et al. 2010; McDowell 2011; Anderegg et al. 2012).”
Will Extreme Climatic Events Facilitate Biological Invasions (2012, background): “In the western US, the compounding effects of recurrent www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America droughts and gradual climate change may induce higher tree mortality during an ECE (Adams et al. 2009).”
Density‐dependent vulnerability of forest ecosystems to drought (2017, background): “The importance of plant population density in governing patterns of resource competition and availability and hence rates of recruitment, growth and mortality is well established (McDowell et al. 2006; Adams et al. 2009).”
Responses to drought stress in Prunus sargentii and Larix kaempferi seedlings using morphological and physiological parameters (2020, background): “…has become one of the most adverse environmental factors for plant growth and productivity influencing the persistence and distribution of plant species (Gulías et al., 2002; Adams et al., 2009; Choat et al., 2012), tree establishment, and the carbon balance of forest trees (Smith et al., 2017).”
Understanding the roles of nonstructural carbohydrates in forest trees - from what we can measure to what we want to know. (2016, background): “In combination with elevated temperature, however, drought leads to higher cumulative respiratory fluxes in leaves compared to drought only, causing a greater whole-plantC loss and potentially starvation (Adams et al., 2009).”
Chronic historical drought legacy exacerbates tree mortality and crown dieback during acute heatwave-compounded drought (2018, background): “More recently, the important interaction between drought and heat has been identified as a driver of forest change (Adams et al 2009, Breshears et al 2013, Allen et al 2015).”