Semi-arid biome vulnerability to nearly two decades of uncharacteristic drought in the Southwestern US
Abstract
Semi-arid biomes provide a wide range of ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration and climate regulation. The quantity and quality of these services is dependent on ecosystem structure and function, both of which are sensitive to drought and drought-related disturbances. The Southwestern US has now experienced close to two decades of uncharacteristic heat/drought and drought-related disturbances. To better understand the impact these climatic anomalies have had on carbon and water cycling on semi-arid biomes across the Southwestern US, we combined 12 years of direct measurements of net ecosystem exchange of carbon and energy across the New Mexico Elevation Gradient of flux towers, and 35-year time series of both Landsat satellite imagery (Landsat 5-8) and climate. We will discuss recent efforts to: 1) calculate a disturbance index using satellite observations to detect and compare changes in the land surface over time in biomes that range from desert ecosystems to high elevation subalpine forests; 2) quantify a significant increase in the frequency of high disturbance anomalies in the last two decades in all biomes; 3) link the increased frequency of these disturbance anomalies to drought; and 4) quantify the carbon and energy balance consequences of these anomalies across these biomes. These results provide a better understanding of how multiple datasets can be combined to identify which biomes appear to be more resilient or vulnerable to the last two decades of drought, and improve our efforts to understand and forecast how future climates will affect carbon/energy dynamics of southwestern landscapes.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.B54B..05L
- Keywords:
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- 0439 Ecosystems;
- structure and dynamics;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0480 Remote sensing;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1615 Biogeochemical cycles;
- processes;
- and modeling;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1910 Data assimilation;
- integration and fusion;
- INFORMATICS