The Impact of More Frequent Droughts on Ecosystem Resiliency
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Academic
In a new paper, Northern Arizona University’s researcher shares the results of a study investigating the impact of more frequent droughts on ecosystem resiliency and how this phenomenon could endanger the land carbon sink.
Image source: Pixabay
By Kerry Bennett
Office of the Vice President for Research
A paper was published in Nature by research assistant professor Christopher Schwalm of Northern Arizona University’s Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss).
Earth’s land carbon sink comprises all the planet’s soils and vegetation, including forests, grasslands and agricultural land. Currently absorbing an estimated 50 percent of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere from human activities, the land carbon sink mitigates carbon dioxide effects on global climate change. The most widespread climatic extreme that negatively affects the land carbon sink is drought.
Schwalm is the lead author of the paper “Global patterns of drought recovery,” representing the work of an interdisciplinary team of scientists, including NAU professor George Koch, also of Ecoss; associate professor of informatics and computing Kiona Ogle; and associate professor of climate science Deborah Huntzinger.
By studying ecosystems as diverse as the tropics and the high northern latitudes, the scientists established drought recovery times are strongly associated with climate and the carbon cycle and are a critical metric for drought impact.
As droughts become more frequent and more severe, researchers believe the time an ecosystem needs to recover, or revert to its pre-drought functional state, may become longer than the time between droughts. These chronic conditions will impair the normal functioning of plants and trees in an ecosystem, the researchers theorize, resulting in widespread degradation of the land carbon sink.
“Current understanding of drought recovery has generally focused on precipitation that ends a drought by alleviating water deficit, as opposed to restoring function in plants, where recovery is often assumed to be rapid and complete once hydrological drought is ameliorated,” Schwalm said. “Yet the time needed for plant function to recover is critical for ecosystem function, because if a new drought arrives before full recovery, an ecosystem may transition to a new state.
Read full article: NAU News
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Taxonomy
- Water Scarcity
- Ecosystem Management
- Scarcity
- Water Scarcity In Desert area
- Ecosystem Management
- Drought
- Consumption