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Climate and plant trait strategies determine tree carbon allocation to leaves and mediate future forest productivity
- Source :
- Global change biologyREFERENCES. 25(10)
- Publication Year :
- 2018
-
Abstract
- Forest leaf area has enormous leverage on the carbon cycle because it mediates both forest productivity and resilience to climate extremes. Despite widespread evidence that trees are capable of adjusting to changes in environment across both space and time through modifying carbon allocation to leaves, many vegetation models use fixed carbon allocation schemes independent of environment, which introduces large uncertainties into predictions of future forest responses to atmospheric CO2 fertilization and anthropogenic climate change. Here, we develop an optimization-based model, whereby tree carbon allocation to leaves is an emergent property of environment and plant hydraulic traits. Using a combination of meta-analysis, observational datasets, and model predictions, we find strong evidence that optimal hydraulic-carbon coupling explains observed patterns in leaf allocation across large environmental and CO2 concentration gradients. Furthermore, testing the sensitivity of leaf allocation strategy to a diversity in hydraulic and economic spectrum physiological traits, we show that plant hydraulic traits in particular have an enormous impact on the global change response of forest leaf area. Our results provide a rigorous theoretical underpinning for improving carbon cycle predictions through advancing model predictions of leaf area, and underscore that tree-level carbon allocation to leaves should be derived from first principles using mechanistic plant hydraulic processes in the next generation of vegetation models.
- Subjects :
- 0106 biological sciences
010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences
media_common.quotation_subject
chemistry.chemical_element
Climate change
Agricultural engineering
Forests
010603 evolutionary biology
01 natural sciences
Carbon cycle
Carbon Cycle
Trees
Environmental Chemistry
Productivity
0105 earth and related environmental sciences
General Environmental Science
media_common
Global and Planetary Change
Ecology
Global warming
Global change
Vegetation
15. Life on land
Carbon
Plant Leaves
chemistry
13. Climate action
Environmental science
Psychological resilience
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 13652486
- Volume :
- 25
- Issue :
- 10
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Global change biologyREFERENCES
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....0f985cf1e826eaada31c12b624d78a56