Response of vegetation to drought time-scales across global land biomes

By S. Vicente‐Serrano, C. Gouveia, Jesús Julio Camarero, S. Beguerı́a, Ricardo M. Trigo, J. López‐Moreno, C. Azorín-Molina, E. Pasho, J. Lorenzo‐Lacruz, J. Revuelto and 2 more. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012

1,532 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We evaluated the response of the Earth land biomes to drought by correlating a drought index with three global indicators of vegetation activity and growth: vegetation indices from satellite imagery, tree-ring growth series, and Aboveground Net Primary Production (ANPP) records. Arid and humid biomes are both affected by drought, and we suggest that the persistence of the water deficit (i.e., the drought time-scale) could be playing a key role in determining the sensitivity of land biomes to drought. We found that arid biomes respond to drought at short time-scales; that is, there is a rapid vegetation reaction as soon as water deficits below normal conditions occur. This may be due to the fact that plant species of arid regions have mechanisms allowing them to rapidly adapt to changing water availability. Humid biomes also respond to drought at short time-scales, but in this case the physiological mechanisms likely differ from those operating in arid biomes, as plants usually have a poor adaptability to water shortage. On the contrary, semiarid and subhumid biomes respond to drought at long time-scales, probably because plants are able to withstand water deficits, but they lack the rapid response of arid biomes to drought. These results are consistent among three vegetation parameters analyzed and across different land biomes, showing that the response of vegetation to drought depends on characteristic drought time-scales for each biome. Understanding the dominant time-scales at which drought most influences vegetation might help assessing the resistance and resilience of vegetation and improving our knowledge of vegetation vulnerability to climate change.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ce71128d240395de81b2b0accc5e8c4847c8345b

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Citations in the corpus

Wheat yield loss attributable to heat waves, drought and water excess at the global, national and subnational scales (2017, methodology): “They bear the great advantage of allowing the diagnosis and the comparison of extreme events in different regions of the world and time of the year on the basis of globally defined thresholds (Zampieri et al 2016, Vicente-Serrano et al 2010, 2013, see Data and Methods section).”
Density‐dependent vulnerability of forest ecosystems to drought (2017, background): “2013), reduce growth (McDowell et al. 2008; Vicente-Serrano et al. 2013; Castagneri et al. 2015) and increase mortality (Breshears et al.”
Time-dependent effects of climate and drought on tree growth in a Neotropical dry forest: Short-term tolerance vs. long-term sensitivity (2014, methodology): “The use of the SPEI is elevant to quantify the effects of droughts on growth at different ime scales (Vicente-Serrano et al., 2013).”
How well do meteorological indicators represent agricultural and forest drought across Europe? (2018, background): “A few globalscale studies have assessed the link between climate variables and vegetation response (Vicente-Serrano et al 2014, 2013, Wu et al 2015).”