Publication Date:
2017-07-08
Description:
Climate extremes have the potential to cause extreme responses of terrestrial ecosystem functioning. However, it is neither straightforward to quantify and predict extreme ecosystem responses, nor to attribute these responses to specific climate drivers. Here, we construct a factorial experiment based on a large ensemble of process-oriented ecosystem model simulations driven by a regional climate model (12 500 model years in 1985–2010) in six European regions. Our aims are to (1) attribute changes in the intensity and frequency of simulated ecosystem productivity extremes (EPEs) to recent changes in climate extremes, CO 2 concentration, and land use, and to (2) assess the effect of timing and seasonal interaction on the intensity of EPEs. Evaluating the ensemble simulations reveals that (1) recent trends in EPEs are seasonally contrasting: spring EPEs show consistent trends towards increased carbon uptake, while trends in summer EPEs are predominantly negative in net e...
Print ISSN:
1748-9318
Electronic ISSN:
1748-9326
Topics:
Biology
,
Energy, Environment Protection, Nuclear Power Engineering
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