Enhanced growth after extreme wetness compensates for post-drought carbon loss in dry forests

Creators: Jiang, Peng; Liu, Hongyan; Piao, Shilong; Ciais, Philippe; Wu, Xiuchen; Yin, Yi; Wang, Hongyan

Abstract

While many studies have reported that drought events have substantial negative legacy effects on forest growth, it remains unclear whether wetness events conversely have positive growth legacy effects. Here, we report pervasive and substantial growth enhancement after extreme wetness by examining tree radial growth at 1929 forest sites, satellite-derived vegetation greenness, and land surface model simulations. Enhanced growth after extreme wetness lasts for 1 to 5 years and compensates for 93 ± 8% of the growth deficit after extreme drought across global water-limited regions. Remarkable wetness-enhanced growths are observed in dry forests and gymnosperms, whereas the enhanced growths after extreme wetness are much smaller in wet forests and angiosperms. Limited or no enhanced growths are simulated by the land surface models after extreme wetness. These findings provide new evidence for improving climate-vegetation models to include the legacy effects of both drought and wet climate extremes.

Additional Information

© 2019 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 11 April 2018; Accepted 24 December 2018; Published 14 January 2019. H.L. was financially supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant No. 41790422, 41325002, 41530747). X.W. was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant No. 41571038). Data availability: The authors declare that the source data supporting the findings of this study are provided within the paper.

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