Changes in rainfall amounts and patterns have been observed and are expected to continue in the near future with potentially significant ecological and societal consequences. Modelling vegetation ...responses to changes in rainfall is thus crucial to project water and carbon cycles in the future. In this study, we present the results of a new model‐data intercomparison project, where we tested the ability of 10 terrestrial biosphere models to reproduce the observed sensitivity of ecosystem productivity to rainfall changes at 10 sites across the globe, in nine of which, rainfall exclusion and/or irrigation experiments had been performed. The key results are as follows: (a) Inter‐model variation is generally large and model agreement varies with timescales. In severely water‐limited sites, models only agree on the interannual variability of evapotranspiration and to a smaller extent on gross primary productivity. In more mesic sites, model agreement for both water and carbon fluxes is typically higher on fine (daily–monthly) timescales and reduces on longer (seasonal–annual) scales. (b) Models on average overestimate the relationship between ecosystem productivity and mean rainfall amounts across sites (in space) and have a low capacity in reproducing the temporal (interannual) sensitivity of vegetation productivity to annual rainfall at a given site, even though observation uncertainty is comparable to inter‐model variability. (c) Most models reproduced the sign of the observed patterns in productivity changes in rainfall manipulation experiments but had a low capacity in reproducing the observed magnitude of productivity changes. Models better reproduced the observed productivity responses due to rainfall exclusion than addition. (d) All models attribute ecosystem productivity changes to the intensity of vegetation stress and peak leaf area, whereas the impact of the change in growing season length is negligible. The relative contribution of the peak leaf area and vegetation stress intensity was highly variable among models.
In this research we evaluated the skill of 10 terrestrial ecosystem models in reproducing aboveground net primary productivity responses as measured in 10 rainfall manipulation experiments.See also the Commentary on this article by Xue Feng, 26, 3190–3192
The Global Carbon Budget 2018 (GCB2018) estimated by the atmospheric CO
2 growth rate, fossil fuel emissions, and modeled (bottom‐up) land and ocean fluxes cannot be fully closed, leading to a ...“budget imbalance,” highlighting uncertainties in GCB components. However, no systematic analysis has been performed on which regions or processes contribute to this term. To obtain deeper insight on the sources of uncertainty in global and regional carbon budgets, we analyzed differences in Net Biome Productivity (NBP) for all possible combinations of bottom‐up and top‐down data sets in GCB2018: (i) 16 dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs), and (ii) 5 atmospheric inversions that match the atmospheric CO
2 growth rate. We find that the global mismatch between the two ensembles matches well the GCB2018 budget imbalance, with Brazil, Southeast Asia, and Oceania as the largest contributors. Differences between DGVMs dominate global mismatches, while at regional scale differences between inversions contribute the most to uncertainty. At both global and regional scales, disagreement on NBP interannual variability between the two approaches explains a large fraction of differences. We attribute this mismatch to distinct responses to El Niño–Southern Oscillation variability between DGVMs and inversions and to uncertainties in land use change emissions, especially in South America and Southeast Asia. We identify key needs to reduce uncertainty in carbon budgets: reducing uncertainty in atmospheric inversions (e.g., through more observations in the tropics) and in land use change fluxes, including more land use processes and evaluating land use transitions (e.g., using high‐resolution remote‐sensing), and, finally, improving tropical hydroecological processes and fire representation within DGVMs.
Key Points
Top‐down and bottom‐up estimates of net land‐atmosphere CO
2 fluxes agree well globally but show important mismatches at regional scales
Regional mismatches are dominated by differences between inversions and interannual variability in CO
2 fluxes
Mismatches between top‐down and bottom‐up data sets are explained by sensitivity to climate and by uncertainty in land use change forcing
Observations from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) satellite have been used to estimate CO2 fluxes in many regions of the globe and provide new insight into the global carbon cycle. The ...objective of this study is to infer the relationships between patterns in OCO-2 observations and environmental drivers (e.g., temperature, precipitation) and therefore inform a process understanding of carbon fluxes using OCO-2. We use a multiple regression and inverse model, and the regression coefficients quantify the relationships between observations from OCO-2 and environmental driver datasets within individual years for 2015–2018 and within seven global biomes. We subsequently compare these inferences to the relationships estimated from 15 terrestrial biosphere models (TBMs) that participated in the TRENDY model inter-comparison. Using OCO-2, we are able to quantify only a limited number of relationships between patterns in atmospheric CO2 observations and patterns in environmental driver datasets (i.e., 10 out of the 42 relationships examined). We further find that the ensemble of TBMs exhibits a large spread in the relationships with these key environmental driver datasets. The largest uncertainty in the models is in the relationship with precipitation, particularly in the tropics, with smaller uncertainties for temperature and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR). Using observations from OCO-2, we find that precipitation is associated with increased CO2 uptake in all tropical biomes, a result that agrees with half of the TBMs. By contrast, the relationships that we infer from OCO-2 for temperature and PAR are similar to the ensemble mean of the TBMs, though the results differ from many individual TBMs. These results point to the limitations of current space-based observations for inferring environmental relationships but also indicate the potential to help inform key relationships that are very uncertain in state-of-the-art TBMs.
Global model estimates of soil carbon changes from past land-use changes remain uncertain. We develop an approach for evaluating dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) against existing ...observational meta-analyses of soil carbon changes following land-use change. Using the DGVM JSBACH, we perform idealized simulations where the entire globe is covered by one vegetation type, which then undergoes a land-use change to another vegetation type. We select the grid cells that represent the climatic conditions of the meta-analyses and compare the mean simulated soil carbon changes to the meta-analyses. Our simulated results show model agreement with the observational data on the direction of changes in soil carbon for some land-use changes, although the model simulated a generally smaller magnitude of changes. The conversion of crop to forest resulted in soil carbon gain of 10 % compared to a gain of 42 % in the data, whereas the forest-to-crop change resulted in a simulated loss of −15 % compared to −40 %. The model and the observational data disagreed for the conversion of crop to grasslands. The model estimated a small soil carbon loss (−4 %), while observational data indicate a 38 % gain in soil carbon for the same land-use change. These model deviations from the observations are substantially reduced by explicitly accounting for crop harvesting and ignoring burning in grasslands in the model. We conclude that our idealized simulation approach provides an appropriate framework for evaluating DGVMs against meta-analyses and that this evaluation helps to identify the causes of deviation of simulated soil carbon changes from the meta-analyses.
Quantifying the net carbon flux from land use and land cover changes (fLULCC) is critical for understanding the global carbon cycle and, hence, to support climate change mitigation. However, ...large-scale fLULCC is not directly measurable and has to be inferred from models instead, such as semi-empirical bookkeeping models and process-based dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs). By definition, fLULCC estimates are not directly comparable between these two different model types. As an important example, DGVM-based fLULCC in the annual global carbon budgets is estimated under transient environmental forcing and includes the so-called loss of additional sink capacity (LASC). The LASC results from the impact of environmental changes on land carbon storage potential of managed land compared to potential vegetation and accumulates over time, which is not captured in bookkeeping models. The fLULCC from transient DGVM simulations, thus, strongly depends on the timing of land use and land cover changes mainly because LASC accumulation is cut off at the end of the simulated period. To estimate the LASC, the fLULCC from pre-industrial DGVM simulations, which is independent of changing environmental conditions, can be used. Additionally, DGVMs using constant present-day environmental forcing enable an approximation of bookkeeping estimates. Here, we analyse these three DGVM-derived fLULCC estimations (under transient, pre-industrial, and present-day forcing) for 12 models within 18 regions and quantify their differences as well as climate- and CO2-induced components and compare them to bookkeeping estimates. Averaged across the models, we find a global fLULCC (under transient conditions) of 2.0±0.6 PgC/yr for 2009–2018, of which ∼40 % are attributable to the LASC (0.8±0.3 PgC/yr). From 1850 onward, the fLULCC accumulated to 189±56 PgC with 40±15 PgC from the LASC. Around 1960, the accumulating nature of the LASC causes global transient fLULCC estimates to exceed estimates under present-day conditions, despite generally increased carbon stocks in the latter. Regional hotspots of high cumulative and annual LASC values are found in the USA, China, Brazil, equatorial Africa, and Southeast Asia, mainly due to deforestation for cropland. Distinct negative LASC estimates in Europe (early reforestation) and from 2000 onward in the Ukraine (recultivation of post-Soviet abandoned agricultural land), indicate that fLULCC estimates in these regions are lower in transient DGVM compared to bookkeeping approaches. Our study unravels the strong dependence of fLULCC estimates on the time a certain land use and land cover change event happened to occur and on the chosen time period for the forcing of environmental conditions in the underlying simulations. We argue for an approach that provides an accounting of the fLULCC that is more robust against these choices, for example by estimating a mean DGVM ensemble fLULCC and LASC for a defined reference period and homogeneous environmental changes (CO2 only).
In many regions of the world, frequent and continual dry spells are exacerbating drought conditions, which have severe impacts on vegetation biomes. Vegetation in southern Africa is among the most ...affected by drought. Here, we assessed the spatiotemporal characteristics of meteorological drought in southern Africa using the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) over a 30-year period (1982-2011). The severity and the effects of droughts on vegetation productiveness were examined at different drought timescales (1- to 24-month timescales). In this study, we characterized vegetation using the leaf area index (LAI) after evaluating its relationship with the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). Correlating the LAI with the SPEI, we found that the LAI responds strongly (r=0.6) to drought over the central and southeastern parts of the region, with weaker impacts (r<0.4) over parts of Madagascar, Angola, and the western parts of South Africa. Furthermore, the latitudinal distribution of LAI responses to drought indicates a similar temporal pattern but different magnitudes across timescales. The results of the study also showed that the seasonal response across different southern African biomes varies in magnitude and occurs mostly at shorter to intermediate timescales. The semi-desert biome strongly correlates (r=0.95) to drought as characterized by the SPEI at a 6-month timescale in the MAM (March-May; summer) season, while the tropical forest biome shows the weakest response (r=0.35) at a 6-month timescale in the DJF (December-February; hot and rainy) season. In addition, we found that the spatial pattern of change of LAI and SPEI are mostly similar during extremely dry and wet years, with the highest anomaly observed in the dry year of 1991, and we found different temporal variability in global and regional responses across different biomes.
Natural and anthropogenic disturbances, in particular forest management, affect forest age structures all around the globe. Forest age structures in turn influence key land surface processes, such as ...photosynthesis and thus the carbon cycle. Yet, many dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs), including those used as land surface models (LSMs) in Earth system models (ESMs), do not account for subgrid forest age structures, despite being used to investigate land-use effects on the global carbon budget or simulating biogeochemical responses to climate change. In this paper we present a new scheme to introduce forest age classes in hierarchical tile-based DGVMs combining benefits of recently applied approaches the first being a computationally efficient age-dependent simulation of all relevant processes, such as photosynthesis and respiration, using a restricted number of age classes and the second being the tracking of the exact forest age, which is a prerequisite for any implementation of age-based forest management. This combination is achieved by using the tile hierarchy to track the area fraction for each age on an aggregated plant functional type level, whilst simulating the relevant processes for a set of age classes. We describe how we implemented this scheme in JSBACH4, the LSM of the ICOsahedral Non-hydrostatic Earth system model (ICON-ESM). Subsequently, we compare simulation output to global observation-based products for gross primary production, leaf area index, and above-ground biomass to assess the ability of simulations with and without age classes to reproduce the annual cycle and large-scale spatial patterns of these variables. The comparisons show decreasing differences and increasing computation costs with an increasing number of distinguished age classes. The results demonstrate the benefit of the introduction of age classes, with the optimal number of age classes being a compromise between computation costs and error reduction.
Forests are the main source of biomass production from solar energy and take up around 2.4±0.4 PgC per year globally. Future changes in climate may affect forest growth and productivity. Currently, ...state-of-the-art Earth system models use prescribed wood harvest rates in future climate projections. These rates are defined by integrated assessment models (IAMs), only accounting for regional wood demand and largely ignoring the supply side from forests. Therefore, we assess how global growth and harvest potentials of forests change when they are allowed to respond to changes in environmental conditions. For this, we simulate wood harvest rates oriented towards the actual rate of forest growth. Applying this growth-based harvest rule (GB) in JSBACH, the land component of the Max Planck Institute's Earth system model, forced by several future climate scenarios, we realized a growth potential 2 to 4 times (3–9 PgC yr−1) the harvest rates prescribed by IAMs (1–3 PgC yr−1). Limiting GB to managed forest areas (MF), we simulated a harvest potential of 3–7 PgC yr−1, 2 to 3 times higher than IAMs. This highlights the need to account for the dependence of forest growth on climate. To account for the long-term effects of wood harvest as integrated in IAMs, we added a life cycle analysis, showing that the higher supply with MF as an adaptive forest harvesting rule may improve the net mitigation effects of forest harvest during the 21st century by sequestering carbon in anthropogenic wood products.
Gaps in our current understanding and quantification of biomass carbon stocks, particularly in tropics, lead to large uncertainty in future projections of the terrestrial carbon balance. We use the ...recently published GlobBiomass data set of forest above‐ground biomass (AGB) density for the year 2010, obtained from multiple remote sensing and in situ observations at 100 m spatial resolution to evaluate AGB estimated by nine dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs). The global total forest AGB of the nine DGVMs is 365 ± 66 Pg C, the spread corresponding to the standard deviation between models, compared to 275 Pg C with an uncertainty of ~13.5% from GlobBiomass. Model‐data discrepancy in total forest AGB can be attributed to their discrepancies in the AGB density and/or forest area. While DGVMs represent the global spatial gradients of AGB density reasonably well, they only have modest ability to reproduce the regional spatial gradients of AGB density at scales below 1000 km. The 95th percentile of AGB density (AGB95) in tropics can be considered as the potential maximum of AGB density which can be reached for a given annual precipitation. GlobBiomass data show local deficits of AGB density compared to the AGB95, particularly in transitional and/or wet regions in tropics. We hypothesize that local human disturbances cause more AGB density deficits from GlobBiomass than from DGVMs, which rarely represent human disturbances. We then analyse empirical relationships between AGB density deficits and forest cover changes, population density, burned areas and livestock density. Regression analysis indicated that more than 40% of the spatial variance of AGB density deficits in South America and Africa can be explained; in Southeast Asia, these factors explain only ~25%. This result suggests TRENDY v6 DGVMs tend to underestimate biomass loss from diverse and widespread anthropogenic disturbances, and as a result overestimate turnover time in AGB.
Biomass is strongly coupled with climate. Growing trees remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it mainly as biomass, whereas adverse climate change can negate this service, causing massive losses during drought and fires. Carbon cycle models struggle to simulate biomass and need to benchmarked by the latest datasets. Here we use a global high‐resolution biomass map derived from remote sensing known as GlobBiomass to evaluate the TRENDY‐Version6 dynamic global vegetation models used to assess each year the global carbon budget, and show that human disturbance reducing biomass in the tropics is a critical process missing in models.
Fluxes from deforestation, changes in land cover, land use and management practices (F.sub.LUC for simplicity) contributed to approximately 14 % of anthropogenic CO.sub.2 emissions in 2009-2018. ...Estimating F.sub.LUC accurately in space and in time remains, however, challenging, due to multiple sources of uncertainty in the calculation of these fluxes. This uncertainty, in turn, is propagated to global and regional carbon budget estimates, hindering the compilation of a consistent carbon budget and preventing us from constraining other terms, such as the natural land sink. Uncertainties in F.sub.LUC estimates arise from many different sources, including differences in model structure (e.g. process based vs. bookkeeping) and model parameterisation. Quantifying the uncertainties from each source requires controlled simulations to separate their effects.
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