@misc{10481/44772,
year = {2016},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/10481/44772},
abstract = {Drought is a global issue that is exacerbated by climate change and increasing anthropogenic water demands. The recent occurrence of drought in California provides an important opportunity to examine drought response across ecosystem classes (forests, shrublands, grasslands, and wetlands), which is essential to understand how climate influences ecosystem structure and function. We quantified ecosystem resistance to drought by comparing changes in satellite-derived estimates of water-use efficiency (WUE = net primary productivity [NPP]/evapotranspiration [ET]) under normal (i.e., baseline) and drought conditions (ΔWUE = WUE2014 − baseline WUE). With this method, areas with increasing WUE under drought conditions are considered more resilient than systems with declining WUE. Baseline WUE varied across California (0.08 to 3.85 g C/mm H2O) and WUE generally increased under severe drought conditions in 2014. Strong correlations between ΔWUE, precipitation, and leaf area index (LAI) indicate that ecosystems with a lower average LAI (i.e., grasslands) also had greater C-uptake rates when water was limiting and higher rates of carbon-uptake efficiency (CUE = NPP/LAI) under drought conditions. We also found that systems with a baseline WUE ≤ 0.4 exhibited a decline in WUE under drought conditions, suggesting that a baseline WUE ≤ 0.4 might be indicative of low drought resistance. Drought severity, precipitation, and WUE were identified as important drivers of shifts in ecosystem classes over the study period. These findings have important implications for understanding climate change effects on primary productivity and C sequestration across ecosystems and how this may influence ecosystem resistance in the future.},
organization = {The authors would like to acknowledge the excellent
support provided by the Open Science for
Synthesis-2014
training (supported by the National
Science Foundation under Grant No. OCI-1216894)
at
the National Center for Ecological Analysis and
Synthesis (NCEAS), a center funded by the University
of California, Santa Barbara, and the State of California.
The authors would like to thank OSS instructors
Nancy Baron, Ben Bolker, Stephanie Hampton,
Matthew Jones, Karthik Ram, Mark Schildhauer, and
the participants of the OSS training. The authors
would also like to thank the Goulden Lab at the
University of California Irvines. A. J. Pérez-Luque
acknowledges funding received by NCEAS and to
MICINN (Spanish Government) for the PTA
2011-6322-
I
contract; D. P. Drucker acknowledges support
from the USAID and the U.S. Department of State
through the Sustainable Landscapes Brazil program;
and M.G. Tulbure acknowledges funding from the
Australian Research Council Early Career Researcher
Award (DE140101608).},
publisher = {Ecological Society of America (ESA)},
keywords = {Carbon-uptake efficiency},
keywords = {Drought effects},
keywords = {Ecosystem resistance},
keywords = {Ecosystem type conversions},
keywords = {Primary productivity},
keywords = {Water-use efficiency},
title = {Drought resistance across California ecosystems: Evaluating changes in carbon dynamics using satellite imagery},
doi = {10.1002/ecs2.1561},
author = {Malone, Sparkle L. and Tulbure, Mirela G. and Pérez-Luque, Antonio Jesús and Assal, Timothy J. and Bremer, Leah L. and Drucker, Debora P. and Hillis, Vicken and Varela, Sara and Goulden, Michael},
}