Joint control of terrestrial gross primary productivity by plant phenology and physiology

Jianyang Xia (1) , Shuli Niu (2) , Philippe Ciais (3, 4) , Ivan A Janssens (5) , Jiquan Chen (6) , Christof Ammann (7) , Altaf Arain (8) , Peter D Blanken (9) , Alessandro Cescatti (10) , Damien Bonal (11) , Nina Buchmann (12) , Peter James Curtis (13) , Shiping Chen (14) , Jinwei Dong (1) , Lawrence B Flanagan (15) , Christian Frankenberg (16) , Teodoro Georgiadis (17) , Christopher M Gough (18) , Dafeng Hui (19) , Gerard Kiely (20) , Jianwei Li (1, 21) , Magnus Lund (22) , Vincenzo Magliulo (23) , Barbara Marcolla (24) , Lutz Merbold (25) , Leonardo Montagnani (26) , Eddy J Moors (27) , Jørgen E Olesen (28) , Shilong Piao (29) , Antonio Raschi (30) , Olivier Roupsard (31) , Andrew E. Suyker (32) , Marek Urbaniak (33) , Francesco P Vaccari (30) , Andrej Varlagin (34) , Timo Vesala (35) , Matthew Wilkinson (36) , Ensheng Weng (37) , Georg Wohlfahrt (38, 39) , Liming Yan (40) , Yiqi Luo (1, 41)

1 Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology
2 Synth Res Ctr Chinese Ecosyst Res Network
3 LSCE - Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement [Gif-sur-Yvette]
4 ICOS-ATC - ICOS-ATC
5 Department of Biology
6 Center for Global Change and Earth Observations and Department of Geography
7 Climate and Air Pollution Group
8 School of Geography and Earth Sciences [Hamilton ON]
9 Department of Geography
10 IES - JRC Institute for Environment and Sustainability
11 EEF - Ecologie et Ecophysiologie Forestières [devient SILVA en 2018]
12 ETH Zürich - Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology [Zürich]
13 Ecology and Organismal Biology
14 State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change
15 Department of Biological Sciences
16 Tropospheric sounding, assimilation, and modeling group [JPL]
17 Institute of Biometeorology
18 Department of Biology
19 Department of Biological Sciences
20 Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and Environmental Research Institute
21 Department of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences
22 Department of Bioscience
23 vInstitute for Mediterranean Agricultural and Forest Systems
24 Sustainable Agro-Ecosystems and Bioresources Department
25 IAS - Institute of Agricultural Science
26 Faculty of Science and Technology
27 Earth System Science and Climate Change Group
28 Department of Agroecology
29 Department of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences
30 Institute of Biometeorology
31 UMR Eco&Sols - Ecologie fonctionnelle et biogéochimie des sols et des agro-écosystèmes
32 School of Natural Resources
33 Department of Meteorology
34 A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution
35 Department of Forest Sciences [Helsinki]
36 Centre for Sustainable Forestry and Climate Change
37 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
38 Institute of Ecology
39 Institute for Applied Remote Sensing and Institute for Alpine Environment
40 School of Life Sciences [Fudan University]
41 CESS - Center for Earth System Science [Beijing]

Terrestrial gross primary productivity (GPP) varies greatly over time and space. A better understanding of this variability is necessary for more accurate predictions of the future climate-carbon cycle feedback. Recent studies have suggested that variability in GPP is driven by a broad range of biotic and abiotic factors operating mainly through changes in vegetation phenology and physiological processes. However, it is still unclear how plant phenology and physiology can be integrated to explain the spatiotemporal variability of terrestrial GPP. Based on analyses of eddy-covariance and satellite-derived data, we decomposed annual terrestrial GPP into the length of the CO2 uptake period (CUP) and the seasonal maximal capacity of CO2 uptake (GPPmax). The product of CUP and GPPmax explained >90% of the temporal GPP variability in most areas of North America during 2000-2010 and the spatial GPP variation among globally distributed eddy flux tower sites. It also explained GPP response to the European heatwave in 2003 (r(2) = 0.90) and GPP recovery after a fire disturbance in South Dakota (r(2) = 0.88). Additional analysis of the eddy-covariance flux data shows that the interbiome variation in annual GPP is better explained by that in GPPmax than CUP. These findings indicate that terrestrial GPP is jointly controlled by ecosystem-level plant phenology and photosynthetic capacity, and greater understanding of GPPmax and CUP responses to environmental and biological variations will, thus, improve predictions of GPP over time and space.

Mots clés: spatiotemporal variability; photosynthetic capacity; growing season length; ecosystem carbon uptake; climate extreme

Domaines: Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]

Jianyang Xia, Shuli Niu, Philippe Ciais, Ivan A Janssens, Jiquan Chen, et al.. Joint control of terrestrial gross primary productivity by plant phenology and physiology. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015, 112 (9), pp.2788-2793. ⟨10.1073/pnas.1413090112⟩. ⟨hal-01268995⟩