Evidence for a weakening relationship between interannual temperature variability and northern vegetation activity

Shilong Piao, Huijuan Nan, Chris Huntingford, Philippe Ciais, Pierre Friedlingstein, Stephen Sitch, Shushi Peng, Anders Ahlström, Josep G. Canadell, Nan Cong, Sam Levis, Peter E. Levy, Lingli Liu, Mark R. Lomas, Jiafu Mao, Ranga B. Myneni, Philippe Peylin, Ben Poulter, Xiaoying Shi, Guodong YinNicolas Viovy, Tao Wang, Xuhui Wang, Soenke Zaehle, Ning Zeng, Zhenzhong Zeng, Anping Chen

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Abstract

Satellite-derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), a proxy of vegetation productivity, is known to be correlated with temperature in northern ecosystems. This relationship, however, may change over time following alternations in other environmental factors. Here we show that above 30°N, the strength of the relationship between the interannual variability of growing season NDVI and temperature (partial correlation coefficient RNDVI-GT) declined substantially between 1982 and 2011. This decrease in RNDVI-GT is mainly observed in temperate and arctic ecosystems, and is also partly reproduced by process-based ecosystem model results. In the temperate ecosystem, the decrease in RNDVI-GT coincides with an increase in drought. In the arctic ecosystem, it may be related to a nonlinear response of photosynthesis to temperature, increase of hot extreme days and shrub expansion over grass-dominated tundra. Our results caution the use of results from interannual time scales to constrain the decadal response of plants to ongoing warming.

Original languageEnglish
Article number5018
JournalNature Communications
Volume5
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 16 2014

Funding

This study was supported by a Strategic Priority Research Program (B) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No.XDB03030404), the National Basic Research Program of China (grant number 2013CB956303), Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection Grant (201209031), National Natural Science Foundation of China (41125004 and 31321061) and the 111 Project(B14001). J.M. and X.S. are supported by the US Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-BATTELLE for DOE under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725.

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