The 2010 spring drought reduced primary productivity in southwestern China

By Li Zhang, J. Xiao, Jing Li, Kun Wang, L. Lei, Huadong Guo. 2012

238 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many parts of the world experience frequent and severe droughts. Summer drought can significantly reduce primary productivity and carbon sequestration capacity. The impacts of spring droughts, however, have received much less attention. A severe and sustained spring drought occurred in southwestern China in 2010. Here we examine the influence of this spring drought on the primary productivity of terrestrial ecosystems using data on climate, vegetation greenness and productivity. We first assess the spatial extent, duration and severity of the drought using precipitation data and the Palmer drought severity index. We then examine the impacts of the drought on terrestrial ecosystems using satellite data for the period 2000–2010. Our results show that the spring drought substantially reduced the enhanced vegetation index (EVI) and gross primary productivity (GPP) during spring 2010 (March–May). Both EVI and GPP also substantially declined in the summer and did not fully recover from the drought stress until August. The drought reduced regional annual GPP and net primary productivity (NPP) in 2010 by 65 and 46 Tg C yr−1, respectively. Both annual GPP and NPP in 2010 were the lowest over the period 2000–2010. The negative effects of the drought on annual primary productivity were partly offset by the remarkably high productivity in August and September caused by the exceptionally wet conditions in late summer and early fall and the farming practices adopted to mitigate drought effects. Our results show that, like summer droughts, spring droughts can also have significant impacts on vegetation productivity and terrestrial carbon cycling.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb7caffe324e9788038e1c515c3f2392ac3f459e

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In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Contrasting response of grassland versus forest carbon and water fluxes to spring drought in Switzerland (2013, background): “These studies reported overall reductions in carbon uptake (Zhang et al 2012, Dong et al 2011, Kwon et al 2008, Parton et al 2012), a small suppression in evapotranspiration (ET; Dong et al 2011), and a shift in the environmental controls of net ecosystem exchange (NEE) from vapour pressure deficit…”
Vegetation response to extreme climate events on the Mongolian Plateau from 2000 to 2010 (2012, background): “…and 2010 (Lewis et al 2011, Philips et al 2009), the widespread, severe drought from 2001 to 2007 in Australia (Ponce-Campos et al 2013), the severe drought in China in 2010 (Zhang et al 2012) and the sustained drought on the Mongolian Plateau from 1999 to 2002 (Fernández-Giménez et al 2012).”
Is southwestern China experiencing more frequent precipitation extremes? (2014, methodology): “Comprehensive knowledge of the probability or risk of the weather extremes is essential for the management and mitigation of natural hazards (Calanca 2007, Cancelliere and Salas 2010, Unkasevic et al 2004, Zhang et al 2012b).”
Multivariate Drought Frequency Analysis using Four-Variate Symmetric and Asymmetric Archimedean Copula Functions (2018, background): “In fact, a noticeable extreme winter-spring droughts events occurred in southwest China from August 2009 to May 2010 (Lu et al. 2011; Lu et al. 2012; Zhang et al. 2012; Yang et al. 2013), while in 2011 the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River were impacted by the spring-summer drought (Lu et”