Publication Date:
2016-12-10
Description:
Several studies have documented that regional climate warming and the resulting increase in drought stress have triggered increased tree mortality in semi-arid forests with unavoidable impacts on regional and global carbon sequestration. Although climate warming is projected to continue into the future, studies examining long-term resilience of semi-arid forests against climate change are limited. In this study, long-term forest resilience was defined as the capacity of forest recruitment to compensate for losses from mortality. We observed an obvious change in long-term forest resilience along a local aridity gradient by reconstructing tree growth trend, disturbance history and investigating post-disturbance regeneration in semi-arid forests in southern Siberia. In our study, with increased severity of local aridity, forests became vulnerable to drought stress, and regeneration first accelerated and then ceased. Radial growth of trees during 1900-2012 was also relatively stable on the moderately arid site. Furthermore, we found that smaller forest patches always have relatively weaker resilience under the same climatic conditions. Our results imply a relatively higher resilience in arid timberline forest patches than in continuous forests; however, further climate warming and increased drought could possibly cause the disappearance of small forest patches around the arid treeline. This study sheds light on climate change adaptation and provides insight into managing vulnerable semi-arid forests. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Print ISSN:
1354-1013
Electronic ISSN:
1365-2486
Topics:
Biology
,
Energy, Environment Protection, Nuclear Power Engineering
,
Geography
