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| 1997-30 |
October 28, 1997 |
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David Hosansky UCAR Communications P.O. Box 3000 Boulder, CO 80307-3000 Telephone: (303) 497-8611 Fax: (303) 497-8610 E-mail: hosansky@ucar.edu
Cheryl Dybas, Media Relations
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"The Response of Global Terrestrial Ecosystems to Interannual Temperature Variability" was written by B.H. (Rob) Braswell, Ernst Linder, and Berrien Moore, all of the University of New Hampshire (UNH); and David Schimel, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder. According to Schimel, the results highlight the power of new data sets on global change, as well as the usefulness of computer models that connect the atmosphere and biosphere. "We were looking specifically for delayed ecosystem responses in this study because they had been predicted by the models," Schimel notes.
Braswell conducted much of the analysis during a graduate fellowship in global change at NCAR sponsored by Oak Ridge Associated Universities and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) Climate System Modeling Project. NCAR is operated by UCAR under sponsorship of the National Science Foundation.
The authors used three main sources of data for the period 1979-94, each compiled and distributed with support from the U.S. Global Change Research Program:
The authors studied the temperature-vegetation relationship by region at data points separated by one degree latitude and longitude (roughly 85 by 110 kilometers, or 50 by 70 miles, at midlatitudes). At the peak of a warm period, plant growth tended to increase in polar and temperate regions and decrease at lower latitudes, including tropical rain forests and drier savanna/grassland regimes. "This contrast suggests that . . . temperature may have direct negative impacts on plant growth or may increase water stress in semiarid ecosystems," the authors note.
However, in the one-to-three-year period after a temperature peak, the patterns appear to reverse: plant growth is enhanced in the warmer and drier regions and limited at higher latitudes. Thus, low-latitude plant growth appears to be driving the enhanced uptake of CO2 during this period.
The paper highlights the importance of regional analyses of climate change to detect areas where effects may run counter to a global average. "This is the first data-based study to consider regionally specific ecosystem responses on a global scale," says Schimel. "The results show quantitatively that ecosystems are sensitive to temperature perturbations."
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