Vegetation and Evapotranspiration Responses to Increased Atmospheric Vapor Pressure Deficit across the Global Forest

作者：Rihong Wen, Meiou Qin, Peng Jiang, Feiyun Yang, Bin Liu, Mengyuan Zhu, Yuan Fang, Yichen Tian, Bo Shang · 发表于：Atmosphere · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.3390/atmos15040408 · 被引用次数：9 · 研究领域：Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics、Climate variability and models、Hydrology and Watershed Management Studies

A forest is vulnerable to drought and plays important roles in the regulation of carbon and water cycling in a terrestrial ecosystem. Atmospheric vapor pressure deficit (VPD) has been identified as an increasingly major factor in plant functioning and has been established as a main contributor to recent drought-induced plant mortality, independent of other drivers associated with climate change. However, most previous studies have focused on the effects of climate warming and CO2 enrichment on vegetation growth, without considering the effects of an increased VPD on vegetation growth and evapotranspiration (ET) in forest ecosystems. This could lead to a large uncertainty in estimating the variability in forest carbon sinks. Based on the long-term satellite data, we investigated the response of the leaf area index (LAI) and ET to the VPD via a partial correlation analysis in this study. We also examined the temporal variability in the partial coefficients within a ten-year moving window. The results showed that over 50% of the region displayed a negative partial correlation between the LAI, ET, and VPD, and those pixels were mainly concentrated in North America and the plains of Eastern Europe. Regions with a negative trend of partial correlation in both the LAI and ET are mostly located in the plains of Eastern Europe and the Siberian Plain of western Russia, while the positive trend is mainly in South America. The plains of Eastern Europe are becoming drier, which was proved...