Publication Date:
2013-07-26
Description:
[1] The response of tropical rainforest to environmental perturbation is of critical importance given their potential to mitigate climate change. Nevertheless, it was not well addressed to date. Therefore, related hypothesizes, i.e. CO 2 fertilization-related accelerating growth (AGH) and remote sensing-based drought resilience (DRH) was necessarily to be testified. Here, these hypothesizes were tested through ten-years of annual inventory records and half-hourly eddy flux measurements from a tropical rainforest. We show that the studied forest is highly sensitive to water variability, with low canopy photosynthesis, slow stand growth, and high mortality rate in dry years, especially in the severe drought. Ecosystem respiration was not correlated with net water balance within years, but significant correlations were found between these parameters with a time lag of 10–15 months. A boom of photosynthesis in one year post-drought was most probably a result of nutrient pulse related drought. In general, neither AGH nor DRH was supported by the study. Given predictions that tropical areas will experience increasingly dry conditions in the future, much attention should be paid to the potential fate of carbon sink in tropical rainforests.
Print ISSN:
0148-0227
Topics:
Geosciences
,
Physics
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