Accelerated dryland expansion regulates future variability in dryland gross primary production
Top Cited Papers
Open Access
- 3 April 2020
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature Communications
- Vol. 11 (1), 1-10
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15515-2
Abstract
Drylands cover 41% of Earth’s surface and are the largest source of interannual variability in the global carbon sink. Drylands are projected to experience accelerated expansion over the next century, but the implications of this expansion on variability in gross primary production (GPP) remain elusive. Here we show that by 2100 total dryland GPP will increase by 12 ± 3% relative to the 2000–2014 baseline. Because drylands will largely expand into formerly productive ecosystems, this increase in dryland GPP may not increase global GPP. Further, GPP per unit dryland area will decrease as degradation of historical drylands outpaces the higher GPP of expanded drylands. Dryland expansion and climate-induced conversions among sub-humid, semi-arid, arid, and hyper-arid subtypes will lead to substantial changes in regional and subtype contributions to global dryland GPP variability. Our results highlight the vulnerability of dryland subtypes to more frequent and severe climate extremes and suggest that regional variations will require different mitigation strategies.Keywords
Funding Information
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (41521004 and 41405010)
This publication has 60 references indexed in Scilit:
- Changing Climate and Overgrazing Are Decimating Mongolian SteppesPLOS ONE, 2013
- Actions of Hydrogen Sulfide and ATP-Sensitive Potassium Channels on Colonic Hypermotility in a Rat Model of Chronic StressPLOS ONE, 2013
- Ecosystem resilience despite large-scale altered hydroclimatic conditionsNature, 2013
- Unexpected patterns of sensitivity to drought in three semi-arid grasslandsOecologia, 2012
- The C4 plant lineages of planet EarthJournal of Experimental Botany, 2011
- Fine gravel controls hydrologic and erodibility responses to trampling disturbance for coarse-textured soils with weak cyanobacterial crustsCATENA, 2010
- Evaluation of Collections 4 and 5 of the MODIS Gross Primary Productivity product and algorithm improvement at a tropical savanna site in northern AustraliaRemote Sensing of Environment, 2009
- Global Desertification: Building a Science for Dryland DevelopmentScience, 2007
- Seasonality of ecosystem respiration and gross primary production as derived from FLUXNET measurementsAgricultural and Forest Meteorology, 2002
- The NCEP/NCAR 40-Year Reanalysis ProjectBulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 1996