Abstract
Extended growing season lengths under climatic warming suggest increased time for plant growth. However, research has focused on climatic impacts to the timing or duration of distinct phenological events. Comparatively little is known about impacts to the relative time allocation to distinct phenological events, for example, the proportion of time dedicated to leaf growth versus senescence. We use multiple satellite and ground-based observations to show that, despite recent climate change during 2001 to 2020, the ratio of time allocated to vegetation green-up over senescence has remained stable [1.27 (± 0.92)] across more than 83% of northern ecosystems. This stability is independent of changes in growing season lengths and is caused by widespread positive relationships among vegetation phenological events; longer vegetation green-up results in longer vegetation senescence. These empirical observations were also partly reproduced by 13 dynamic global vegetation models. Our work demonstrates an intrinsic biotic control to vegetation phenology that could explain the timing of vegetation senescence under climate change.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | eadn2487 |
| Journal | Science Advances |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 23 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 2024 |
Funding
Acknowledgments Funding: F.M. and t.d. would like to acknowledge support from the Joint Key Research Fund under cooperative agreement between the national natural Science Foundation of china and tibet Autonomous Region (U20A2005), Strategic Priority Research Program (A) of the chinese Academy of Sciences (XdA26050501). A.c. was supported by a diScOveR seed grant from colorado State University\u2019s data Science Research institute. J.M. was supported by the terrestrial ecosystem Science Scientific Focus Area project funded by the U.S. department of energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and environmental Research. Oak Ridge national laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. department of energy under contract no. de-Ac05-00OR22725. W.K.S. was supported by the nASA carbon cycle and ecosystems Program under grant 80nSSc21K1709. S.W. was supported by the projects from the national Science Foundation of china (42230504). the findings and conclusions in this publication are those of the authors and should not be construed to represent any official U.S. department of Agriculture or U.S. government determination or policy. Author contributions: conceptualization: F.M. and A.c. Methodology: F.M., A.c., and Y.d. investigation: F.M. and A.c. visualization: F.M. Supervision: F.M. and A.c. Writing\u2014original draft: F.M. and A.c. Writing\u2014review and editing: F.M., A.c., A.J.F., J.M., n.c., W.K.S., c.K., Z.h., S.h., J.K., Y.Y., B.G., Y.d., S.l., t.d., and S.W. Competing interests: the authors declare that they have no competing interests. Data and materials availability: All data supporting the results are available as follows: the MOd13c1 version 6 ndvi dataset, https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mod13c1v006/; the cSiF dataset, https:// doi.org/10.17605/OSF.iO/8XQY6; the GiMMS ndvi3g dataset, https://climatedataguide. ucar.edu/climate-data/ndvi-normalized-difference-vegetation-index-3rd-generation-nasagfsc-gimms; the Phenocam dataset v2.0, https://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/dsviewer. pl?ds_id=1674; the Mcd12Q2 version 6.1 phenology dataset, https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/ products/mcd12q2v061/; the FlUXnet2015 tier 2 dataset, http://fluxnet.fluxdata.org/ data/fluxnet2015-dataset/; the tRendY v9 GPP dataset, model outputs generated by tRendY v9 ecosystem models are available from S. Stich ([email protected]) or P. Friedlingstein ([email protected]) upon request.; the Mcd12c1 version 6 vegetation type dataset, https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mcd12c1v006/; the cRU tS version 4.05 dataset, https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/cru_ts_4.05/; the nOAA cO2 dataset, https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/mbl/data.php; and the digital elevation Model dataset, https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/sensors/srtm. All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials.