•We addressed growth and water use strategies of four Mediterranean tree species.•Water supply and demand affected tree water deficit interactively, not additively.•Transpiration and tree water ...storage dynamics were generally coupled to drying soil.•Pines showed the most conservative water use and the largest stem growth rates.•Pines minimised drought-related declines in growth-based water use efficiency.
Drought limits tree water use and growth of Mediterranean trees. However, growth and water use strategies are rarely addressed simultaneously across species and drought conditions. Here, we investigate the link between stem diameter variations and sap flow in four co-existing Mediterranean trees (Pinus halepensis Mill., Quercus pubescens Willd., Quercus ilex L. and Arbutus unedo L.), under relatively wet (2011) and dry (2012) conditions. Continuous stem diameter variations were converted to basal area increment (BAI) and de-trended to estimate tree water deficit (ΔW), an indicator of stem hydration. P. halepensis and Q. pubescens showed the most and the least conservative sap flow density (JS) regulation under drought, respectively, with Q. ilex and A.unedo showing intermediate drought responses. All species, except A. unedo, showed some between-year variability in the environmental control of JS. Seasonal stem shrinkage in response to drought (i.e., increasing ΔW) and subsequent trunk rehydration after rainfall (i.e., decreasing ΔW) occurred in all species. Vapor pressure deficit (VPD) and soil moisture (θ) interacted to determine seasonal variation in ΔW. Interestingly, in the dry year, 2012, more species-specific differences were found in the responses of ΔW to θ and VPD. Across species, JS and ΔW began to decline at similar soil moisture thresholds, underpinning the tight link between JS and ΔW under varying drought conditions. Annual BAI decreased proportionally more than tree-level transpiration (JT) between the wet (2011) and the dry (2012) year, hence growth-based WUE (WUEBAI=BAI/JT) decreased for all species, albeit less acutely for P. halepensis. Overall, despite their contrasting leaf habit and wood type, the studied Mediterranean tree species show coordinated responses of transpiration, water storage dynamics and growth-based WUE which allow them to cope with seasonal and interannual drought.
•Black locust growth is currently limited by low temperatures in Mediterranean region.•We inverse calibrated GOTILWA + vegetation model from observed sap flow data.•Increasing severity of climate ...change enhances black locust growth.•Growth enhancement is driven by an increased daily productivity and an extended growing season.
Mediterranean riparian forests are comparably humid environments that provide shelter for several broadleaved deciduous tree species at their southernmost distribution margin. The stability of these communities, however, is threatened by climate change as well as invasive tree species, such as black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia L.). So far, black locust's European distribution appears to be mostly limited by low temperatures, but global warming might enhance its growth in colder areas. Moreover, R. pseudoacacia can better access water from the phreatic level than some native non-phreatophytic tree species such as European ash (Fraxinus excelsior L.). In this study, we compare the performance of European ash, a native deciduous tree species at its southernmost distribution border, with the invasive black locust, under a range of climate change projections, in a stand located at N.E. Spain. We first use Bayesian inference to calibrate the GOTILWA + vegetation model against sap flow data for both tree species. We then project each tree species’ performance under several climate change scenarios. Our results indicate that increasing temperatures will enlarge black locust's vegetative period, leading to substantially increased annual productivity if the phreatic water table keeps reachable. For European ash, we project a slight increase in productivity, but with higher uncertainty. Our findings suggest that black locust will profit more from global warming than the native European ash, which is concerning because of the already detrimental impact of black locust for the local ecosystems. We conclude that climate change has the potential to stimulate black locust growth on Mediterranean riparian forests. Forest management should therefore include mechanisms to avoid black locust establishment, such as avoid clear-cutting and maintaining closed riparian forest canopies.
Abstract
Polylepis trees occur throughout the Andean mountain region, and it is the tree genus that grows at the highest elevation worldwide. In the humid Andes where moisture is rarely limiting, ...Polylepis trees must adapt to extreme environmental conditions, especially rapid fluctuations in temperature, ultraviolet radiation and vapor pressure deficit (VPD). However, Polylepis’ water-use patterns remain largely unknown despite the importance of understanding their response to microclimate variation to determine their capacity to maintain resilience under future environmental change. We conducted a study in a Polylepis reticulata Kunth forest in the Ecuadorian Andes to evaluate its tree water-use dynamics and to identify the main environmental drivers of transpiration. Tree sap flow was monitored simultaneously with soil volumetric water content (VWC) and microclimate during 2 years for trees growing in forest edge and interior locations. We found that sap flow was primarily controlled by VPD and that VWC exerted a secondary role in driving sap flow dynamics. The highest values for sap flow rates were found when VPD > 0.15 kPa and VCW < 0.73 cm3 cm−3, but these threshold conditions only occurred during brief periods of time and were only found in 11% of our measurements. Moreover, these brief windows of more favorable conditions occurred more frequently in forest edge compared with forest interior locations, resulting in edge trees maintaining 46% higher sap flow compared with interior trees. Our results also suggest that P. reticulata has a low stomatal control of transpiration, as the sap flow did not decline with increasing VPD. This research provides valuable information about the potential impacts of projected future increases in VPD due to climate change on P. reticulata water-use dynamics, which include higher sap flow rates leading to greater transpirational water loss due to this species’ poor stomatal control.
The RheaG Weather Generator Algorithm Nadal-Sala, Daniel; Gracia, Carlos A.; Sabaté, Santiago
Journal of applied meteorology and climatology,
01/2019, Letnik:
58, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper describes the assumptions, equations, and procedures of the RheaG weather generator algorithm (WGA). RheaG was conceived for the generation of robust daily meteorological time series, ...whether in static or transient climate conditions. Here we analyze its performance in four Iberian locations—Bilbao, Barcelona, Madrid, and Sevilla—with differentiated climate characteristics. To validate the RheaG WGA, we compared observed and generated meteorological time series’ statistical properties of precipitation, maximum temperature, and minimum temperature for all four locations. We also compared observed and simulated rain events spell length probabilities in all four locations. Finally, RheaG includes two weather generation procedures: one in which monthly mean values for meteorological variables are unconstrained and one in which they are constrained according to a predefined baseline climate variability. Here, we compare the two weather generation procedures included in RheaG using the observed data from Barcelona. Our results present a high agreement in the statistical properties and the rain spell length probabilities between observed and generated meteorological time series. Our results show that RheaG accurately reproduces seasonal patterns of the observed meteorological time series for all four locations, and it is even able to differentiate two climatic seasons in Bilbao that are also present in the observed data. We find a trade-off between generation procedures in which the unconstrained procedure better reproduces the variability of monthly and yearly precipitation than the constrained one, but the constrained procedure is able to keep the same climatic signal across meteorological time series. Thus, the first procedure is more accurate, but the latter is able to maintain spatial autocorrelation among generated meteorological time series.
Studies of climate change impacts on agricultural land use generally consider sets of climates combined with fixed socio-economic scenarios, making it impossible to compare the impact of specific ...factors within these scenario sets. Analysis of the impact of specific scenario factors is extremely difficult due to prohibitively long run-times of the complex models. This study produces and combines metamodels of crop and forest yields and farm profit, derived from previously developed very complex models, to enable prediction of European land use under any set of climate and socio-economic data. Land use is predicted based on the profitability of the alternatives on every soil within every 10’ grid across the EU. A clustering procedure reduces 23,871 grids with 20+ soils per grid to 6,714 clusters of common soil and climate. Combined these reduce runtime 100 thousand-fold. Profit thresholds define land as intensive agriculture (arable or grassland), extensive agriculture or managed forest, or finally unmanaged forest or abandoned land. The demand for food as a function of population, imports, food preferences and bioenergy, is a production constraint, as is irrigation water available. An iteration adjusts prices to meet these constraints. A range of measures are derived at 10’ grid-level such as diversity as well as overall EU production. There are many ways to utilise this ability to do rapid What-If analysis of both impact and adaptations. The paper illustrates using two of the 5 different GCMs (CSMK3, HADGEM with contrasting precipitation and temperature) and two of the 4 different socio-economic scenarios (“We are the world”, “Should I stay or should I go” which have contrasting demands for land), exploring these using two of the 13 scenario parameters (crop breeding for yield and population) . In the first scenario, population can be increased by a large amount showing that food security is far from vulnerable. In the second scenario increasing crop yield shows that it improves the food security problem.
Fire is a major agent involved in landscape transformation and an indirect cause of changes in species composition. Responses to fire may vary greatly depending on life histories and functional ...traits of species. We have examined the taxonomic and functional responses to fire of eight taxonomic animal groups displaying a gradient of dietary and mobility patterns: Gastropoda, Heteroptera, Formicidae, Coleoptera, Araneae, Orthoptera, Reptilia and Aves. The fieldwork was conducted in a Mediterranean protected area on 3 sites (one unburnt and two burnt with different postfire management practices) with five replicates per site. We collected information from 4606 specimens from 274 animal species. Similarity in species composition and abundance between areas was measured by the Bray-Curtis index and ANOSIM, and comparisons between animal and plant responses by Mantel tests. We analyze whether groups with the highest percentage of omnivorous species, these species being more generalist in their dietary habits, show weak responses to fire (i.e. more similarity between burnt and unburnt areas), and independent responses to changes in vegetation. We also explore how mobility, i.e. dispersal ability, influences responses to fire. Our results demonstrate that differences in species composition and abundance between burnt and unburnt areas differed among groups. We found a tendency towards presenting lower differences between areas for groups with higher percentages of omnivorous species. Moreover, taxa with a higher percentage of omnivorous species had significantly more independent responses of changes in vegetation. High- (e.g. Aves) and low-mobility (e.g. Gastropoda) groups had the strongest responses to fire (higher R scores of the ANOSIM); however, we failed to find a significant general pattern with all the groups according to their mobility. Our results partially support the idea that functional traits underlie the response of organisms to environmental changes caused by fire.
Regional-level applications of dynamic vegetation models are challenging because they need to accommodate the variation in plant functional diversity, which requires moving away from broadly defined ...functional types. Different approaches have been adopted in the last years to incorporate a trait-based perspective into modeling exercises. A common parametrization strategy involves using trait data to represent functional variation between individuals while discarding taxonomic identity. However, this strategy ignores the phylogenetic signal of trait variation and cannot be employed when predictions for specific taxa are needed, such as in applications to inform forest management planning. An alternative strategy involves adapting the taxonomic resolution of model entities to that of the data source employed for large-scale initialization and estimating functional parameters from available plant trait databases, adopting diverse solutions for missing data and non-observable parameters. Here we report the advantages and limitations of this second strategy according to our experience in the development of MEDFATE (version 2.9.3), a novel cohort-based and trait-enabled model of forest dynamics, for its application over a region in the western Mediterranean Basin. First, 217 taxonomic entities were defined according to woody species codes of the Spanish National Forest Inventory. While forest inventory records were used to obtain some empirical parameter estimates, a large proportion of physiological, morphological, and anatomical parameters were matched to measured plant traits, with estimates extracted from multiple databases and averaged at the required taxonomic level. Estimates for non-observable key parameters were obtained using meta-modeling and calibration exercises. Missing values were addressed using imputation procedures based on trait covariation, taxonomic averages or both. The model properly simulated observed historical changes in basal area, with a performance similar to an empirical model trained for the same region. While strong efforts are still required to parameterize trait-enabled models for multiple taxa, and to incorporate intra-specific trait variability, estimation procedures such as those presented here can be progressively refined, transferred to other regions or models and iterated following data source changes by employing automated workflows. We advocate for the adoption of trait-enabled and population-structured models for regional-level projections of forest function and dynamics.
Robinia pseudoacacia
L. occupies large areas of Mediterranean riparian zones of the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula. This study investigates the influence of the invasive alien nitrogen-fixing
R. ...pseudoacacia
on leaf litter nitrogen (N) inputs and soil N availability in a mixed riparian forest in NE Spain. We measured annual leaf litter N inputs, decomposition rates, soil N processes, and soil N concentrations at three sections (near-stream, intermediate, and hillslope) across a riparian forested zone. Moreover, we explored changes in soil N availability associated with the presence of
R. pseudoacacia
by means of an empirical forest floor model. Leaf litter N content was higher for
R. pseudoacacia
than for the native non-fixing species. Although the contribution of
R. pseudoacacia
to annual leaf litter N inputs increased from the near-stream to the hillslope section, soil N mineralization, nitrification, and N availability were similar among sections. Simulations suggest that soil N availability was higher at the near-stream than at the hillslope section without the presence of
R. pseudoacacia
. However, this pattern smoothed down as
R. pseudoacacia
spread across the riparian forest. Overall, our results suggest that the spreading of
R. pseudoacacia
across the riparian zone contributed to homogenize soil N availability over time, and highlight that an integrated spatiotemporal view of the invasive process is needed to assess its impact on soil N biogeochemistry.
Predicting the large-scale consequences of drought in contrasting environments requires that we understand how drought effects differ among species originating from those environments. A previous ...meta-analysis of published experiments suggested that the effects of drought on both stomatal and non-stomatal limitations to photosynthesis may vary consistently among species from different hydroclimates. Here, we explicitly tested this hypothesis with two short-term water stress experiments on congeneric mesic and xeric species. One experiment was run in Australia using Eucalyptus species and the second was run in Spain using Quercus species as well as two more mesic species. In each experiment, plants were grown under moist conditions in a glasshouse, then deprived of water, and gas exchange was monitored. The stomatal response was analysed with a recently developed stomatal model, whose single parameter g1 represents the slope of the relationship between stomatal conductance and photosynthesis. The non-stomatal response was partitioned into effects on mesophyll conductance (gm), the maximum Rubisco activity (Vcmax) and the maximum electron transport rate (Jmax). We found consistency among the drought responses of g1, gm, Vcmax and Jmax, suggesting that drought imposes limitations on Rubisco activity and RuBP regeneration capacity concurrently with declines in stomatal and mesophyll conductance. Within each experiment, the more xeric species showed relatively high g1 under moist conditions, low drought sensitivity of g1, gm, Vcmax and Jmax, and more negative values of the critical pre-dawn water potential at which Vcmax declines most steeply, compared with the more mesic species. These results indicate adaptive interspecific differences in drought responses that allow xeric tree species to continue transpiration and photosynthesis for longer during periods without rain.
Vegetation plays a key role in riparian area functioning by controlling water and nitrate (N─NO3−) transfers to streams. We investigated how spatial heterogeneity modifies the influence of vegetation ...transpiration on soil water and N─NO3− balances in the vadose soil of a Mediterranean riparian forest. On the basis of field data, we simulated water flow and N─NO3− transport in three riparian zones (i.e., near‐stream, intermediate, and hillslope) using HYDRUS‐1D model. We investigated spatiotemporal patterns across the riparian area over a 3‐year period and future years using an IPCC/CMIP5 climate projection for the Mediterranean region. Potential evapotranspiration was partitioned between evaporation and transpiration to estimate transpiration rates at the area. Denitrification in the forest was negligible, thus N─NO3− removal was only considered through plant uptake. For the three riparian zones, the model successfully predicted field soil moisture (θ). The near‐stream zone exchanged larger volumes of water and supported higher θ and transpiration rates (666 ± 75 mm) than the other two riparian zones. Total water fluxes, θ, and transpiration rates decreased near the intermediate (536 ± 46 mm transpired) and hillslope zones (406 ± 26 mm transpired), suggesting that water availability was restricted due to deeper groundwater. Transpiration strongly decreased θ and soil N─NO3− in the hillslope and intermediate zones. Our climate projections highlight the importance of groundwater availability and indicate that soil N─NO3− would be expected to increase due to changes in plant‐root uptake. Lower water availability in the hillslope zone may reduce the effectiveness of N─NO3− removal in the riparian area, increasing the risk of excess N─NO3− leaching into the stream.
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