Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Data-Based Perfect-Deficit Approach To Understanding Climate Extremes And Forest Carbon Assimilation Capacity, Suhua Wei, Chuixiang Yi, George Hendrey, Timothy Eaton, Gerald Rustic, Shaoqiang Wang, Heping Liu, Nir Y. Krakauer, Weiguo Wang, Ankur R. Desai, Leonardo Montagnani, Kyaw Tha Paw U, Matthias Falk, Andrew Black, Christian Bernhofer, Thomas Grünwald, Tuomas Laurila, Alessandro Cescatti, Eddy Moors, Rosvel Bracho, Riccardo Valentini

Publications and Research

Several lines of evidence suggest that the warming climate plays a vital role in driving certain types of extreme weather. The impact of warming and of extreme weather on forest carbon assimilation capacity is poorly known. Filling this knowledge gap is critical towards understanding the amount of carbon that forests can hold. Here, we used a perfect-deficit approach to identify forest canopy photosynthetic capacity (CPC) deficits and analyze how they correlate to climate extremes, based on observational data measured by the eddy covariance method at 27 forest sites over 146 site-years. We found that droughts severely affect the carbon assimilation …