Search from over 60,000 research works

Advanced Search

Increased water-use efficiency and reduced CO2 uptake by plants during droughts at a continental-scale

[thumbnail of manuscript_WUE_v20_maintext.pdf]
Preview
manuscript_WUE_v20_maintext.pdf - Accepted Version (268kB) | Preview
[thumbnail of SupplementaryInfo.pdf]
Preview
SupplementaryInfo.pdf - Supplemental Material (20MB) | Preview
Add to AnyAdd to TwitterAdd to FacebookAdd to LinkedinAdd to PinterestAdd to Email

Peters, W., Van der Velde, I., Van Schaik, E., Miller, J., Ciais, P., Duarte, H., van der Laan-Luijkx, I., Van der Molen, M., Scholze, M., Schaefer, K., Vidale, P. L. orcid id iconORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1800-8460, Verhoef, A. orcid id iconORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9498-6696, Warlind, D., Zhu, D., Tans, P., Vaughn, B. and White, J. (2018) Increased water-use efficiency and reduced CO2 uptake by plants during droughts at a continental-scale. Nature Geoscience, 11. pp. 744-748. ISSN 1752-0894 doi: 10.1038/s41561-018-0212-7

Abstract/Summary

Severe droughts in the Northern Hemisphere cause a widespread decline of agricultural yield, the reduction of forest carbon uptake, and increased CO2 growth rates in the atmosphere. Plants respond to droughts by partially closing their stomata to limit their evaporative water loss, at the expense of carbon uptake by photosynthesis. This trade-off maximizes their water-use efficiency (WUE), as measured for many individual plants under laboratory conditions and field experiments. Here we analyse the 13C/12C stable isotope ratio in atmospheric CO2 to provide new observational evidence of the impact of droughts on the WUE across areas of millions of square kilometres and spanning one decade of recent climate variability. We find strong and spatially coherent increases in WUE along with widespread reductions of net carbon uptake over the Northern Hemisphere during severe droughts that affected Europe, Russia and the United States in 2001–2011. The impact of those droughts on WUE and carbon uptake by vegetation is substantially larger than simulated by the land-surface schemes of six state-of-the-art climate models. This suggests that drought-induced carbon–climate feedbacks may be too small in these models and improvements to their vegetation dynamics using stable isotope observations can help to improve their drought response.

Altmetric Badge

Item Type Article
URI https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/78233
Item Type Article
Refereed Yes
Divisions Science > School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Science > Department of Geography and Environmental Science
Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > NCAS
Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Publisher Nature Publishing Group
Download/View statistics View download statistics for this item

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

University Staff: Request a correction | Centaur Editors: Update this record

Search Google Scholar