Soil contains the largest terrestrial pool of carbon (C), but how this pool will be affected by global change remains unknown. Warmer temperatures generally increase soil respiration, while additional C inputs from plants to soil can increase or decrease soil C decomposition rates through a phenomenon known as priming. Priming […]
Increasing wildfire activity in Alaska’s boreal forests has led to greater fuel-reduction management. Management has been implemented to reduce wildfire spread, but the ecological impacts of these practices are poorly known. We quantified the effects of hand-thinning and shearblading on above- and belowground stand characteristics, plant species composition, carbon (C) and […]
Climate warming can result in both abiotic (e.g., permafrost thaw) and biotic (e.g., microbial functional genes) changes in Arctic tundra. Recent research has incorporated dynamic permafrost thaw in Earth system models (ESMs) and indicates that Arctic tundra could be a significant future carbon (C) source due to the enhanced decomposition […]
Dominant canopy tree species have strong effects on the composition and function of understory species, particularly bryophytes. In boreal forests, bryophytes and their associated microbes are a primary source of ecosystem nitrogen (N) inputs, and an important process regulating ecosystem productivity. We investigated how feather moss-associated N2-fixation rates and contribution […]
Recent evidences show that terrestrial biogeochemical models have large uncertainty in estimating climate-change effect on grassland net ecosystem productivity (NEP), which is defined as the difference between gross ecosystem photosynthesis (GEP) and respiration (ER). It remains unclear that whether GEP or ER limits the model capability to simulate NEP responses […]
Quantifying the ecological patterns of loss of ecosystem function in extreme drought is important to understand the carbon exchange between the land and atmosphere. Rain-use efficiency [RUE; gross primary production (GPP)/precipitation] acts as a typical indicator of ecosystem function. In this study, a novel method based on maximum rain-use efficiency […]
Satellite derived vegetation indices (VIs) are broadly used in ecological research, ecosystem modeling, and land surface monitoring. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), perhaps the most utilized VI, has countless applications across ecology, forestry, agriculture, wildlife, biodiversity, and other disciplines. Calculating satellite derived NDVI is not always straight-forward, however, as […]
Clouds and aerosols increase the fraction of global solar irradiance that is diffuse light. This phenomenon is known to increase the photosynthetic light use efficiency (LUE) of closed-canopy vegetation by redistributing photosynthetic photon flux density (400–700 nm) from saturated, sunlit leaves at the top of the canopy, to shaded leaves […]
Plant phenology is a sensitive indicator of the effects of global change on terrestrial ecosystems and controls the timing of key ecosystem functions including photosynthesis and transpiration. Aerial drone imagery and photogrammetric techniques promise to advance the study of phenology by enabling the creation of distortion-free orthomosaics of plant canopies […]
Over the last two decades, satellite-derived estimates of biophysical variables have been increasingly used in operational services, requiring quantification of their accuracy and uncertainty. Evaluating satellite-derived vegetation products is challenging due to their moderate spatial resolution, the heterogeneity of the terrestrial landscape, and difficulties in adequately characterising spatial and temporal […]