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- Treydte, Kerstin, et al.
(författare)
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Recent human-induced atmospheric drying across Europe unprecedented in the last 400 years
- 2024
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Ingår i: NATURE GEOSCIENCE. - 1752-0894 .- 1752-0908. ; 17, s. 58-65
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The vapor pressure deficit reflects the difference between how much moisture the atmosphere could and actually does hold, a factor that fundamentally affects evapotranspiration, ecosystem functioning, and vegetation carbon uptake. Its spatial variability and long-term trends under natural versus human-influenced climate are poorly known despite being essential for predicting future effects on natural ecosystems and human societies such as crop yield, wildfires, and health. Here we combine regionally distinct reconstructions of pre-industrial summer vapor pressure deficit variability from Europe's largest oxygen-isotope network of tree-ring cellulose with observational records and Earth system model simulations with and without human forcing included. We demonstrate that an intensification of atmospheric drying during the recent decades across different European target regions is unprecedented in a pre-industrial context and that it is attributed to human influence with more than 98% probability. The magnitude of this trend is largest in Western and Central Europe, the Alps and Pyrenees region, and the smallest in southern Fennoscandia. In view of the extreme drought and compound events of the recent years, further atmospheric drying poses an enhanced risk to vegetation, specifically in the densely populated areas of the European temperate lowlands. The atmosphere has dried across most regions of Europe in recent decades, a trend that can be attributed primarily to human impacts, according to tree ring records spanning 400 years and Earth system model simulations.
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| 2. |
- Wardle, David, et al.
(författare)
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Drivers of inter-year variability of plant production and decomposers across contrasting island ecosystems
- 2012
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Ingår i: Ecology. - : Wiley. - 0012-9658 .- 1939-9170. ; 93:3, s. 521-531
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Despite the likely importance of inter-year dynamics of plant production and consumer biota for driving community-and ecosystem-level processes, very few studies have explored how and why these dynamics vary across contrasting ecosystems. We utilized a well-characterized system of 30 lake islands in the boreal forest zone of northern Sweden across which soil fertility and productivity vary considerably, with larger islands being more fertile and productive than smaller ones. In this system we assessed the inter-year dynamics of several measures of plant production and the soil microbial community (primary consumers in the decomposer food web) for each of nine years, and soil microfaunal groups (secondary and tertiary consumers) for each of six of those years. We found that, for measures of plant production and each of the three consumer trophic levels, inter-year dynamics were strongly affected by island size. Further, many variables were strongly affected by island size (and thus bottom-up regulation by soil fertility and resources) in some years, but not in other years, most likely due to inter-year variation in climatic conditions. For each of the plant and microbial variables for which we had nine years of data, we also determined the inter-year coefficient of variation (CV), an inverse measure of stability. We found that CVs of some measures of plant productivity were greater on large islands, whereas those of other measures were greater on smaller islands; CVs of microbial variables were unresponsive to island size. We also found that the effects of island size on the temporal dynamics of some variables were related to inter-year variability of macroclimatic variables. As such, our results show that the inter-year dynamics of both plant productivity and decomposer biota across each of three trophic levels, as well as the inter-year stability of plant productivity, differ greatly across contrasting ecosystems, with potentially important but largely overlooked implications for community and ecosystem processes.
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