How a priori forest adaptations affect drought resilience to the 2012-2015 California drought
Abstract
As evidenced by the fact that they can survive for hundreds to thousands of yearsforests have a remarkable ability to adapt to climatic variations. However, the recent increase in forest drought mortality has shown that forests abilities to adapt are being pushed to their limits. Since forests cover 30% of the land surface and affect the radiation, carbon and water cycles, forests reactions to climate change are integral in being able to predict climate change itself, as well as numerous ecosystem services they provide. One problem in predicting forests response to drought is that the response depends in part upon a priori conditions. In general, wet conditions enhance growth whereas dry conditions suppress growth. However, depending on the magnitude, dry a priori climates can provide less biomass to support during a drought, while wet a priori climates can stimulate growth and increase access to stored resources during a drought. In order to answer how forest drought resilience responds to a continuum of a priori climate, we can use an eco-hydrologic model to simulate various a priori conditions. The 2012-2015 drought that occurred across the well instrumented Southern Sierran Critical Zone Observatory provides a unique opportunity to parameterize a model to answer this question. In this paper, we utilized the Regional Hydro-Ecologic Simulation System (RHESSys) to first explore how ecophysiological parameter sets, that reflect both uncertainty and plasticity in tree characteristics, affect our ability to predict this extreme drought event, and then we explore how variations in a priori climate affect forests response to drought, across a range of forest age structure.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021AGUFM.B15E1475H