I. Colin Prentice results 46
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Plants employ multiple strategies to adapt to their growth environment. Characterizing key dimensions in plant trait space is important for understanding functional diversity within ecosystems. Leaf and root functional traits have been studied in the context of resource economics, but whether they covary, and through which mechanisms, is still debated. We investigated this in subtropical forests by sampling root and leaf trait...
Influence of global climate modes on wildfire occurrence in the contiguous United States under recent and future climatesNARA Subscribed
Predictable modes of climate variability, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), have a major influence on regional weather patterns, an important control on wildfire occurrence. Although these global climate modes have been associated with historical variability in wildfire occurrence in the United States and are used to forecast seasonal wildfire risk, precise information about the spatial pattern and magnitude of...
Leaf phenology, represented at the ecosystem scale by the seasonal dynamics of leaf area index (LAI), is a key control on the exchanges of CO 2 , energy, and water between the land and atmosphere. Robust simulation of leaf phenology is thus important for both dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) and land‐surface representations in climate and Earth System models. There is no general agreement on how leaf phenology should b...
The Response of Carbon Uptake to Soil Moisture Stress: Adaptation to Climatic AridityNARA Subscribed
The coupling between carbon uptake and water loss through stomata implies that gross primary production (GPP) can be limited by soil water availability through reduced leaf area and/or stomatal conductance. Ecosystem and land‐surface models commonly assume that GPP is highest under well‐watered conditions and apply a stress function to reduce GPP as soil moisture declines. Optimality considerations, however, suggest that the s...
Soil Nitrogen Supply Exerts Largest Influence on Leaf Nitrogen in Environments with the Greatest Leaf Nitrogen DemandNARA Subscribed
Accurately representing the relationships between nitrogen supply and photosynthesis is crucial for reliably predicting carbon–nitrogen cycle coupling in Earth System Models (ESMs). Most ESMs assume positive correlations amongst soil nitrogen supply, leaf nitrogen content, and photosynthetic capacity. However, leaf photosynthetic nitrogen demand may influence the leaf nitrogen response to soil nitrogen supply; thus, responses...
Holocene vegetation dynamics of the Eastern Mediterranean region: Old controversies addressed by a new analysisNARA Subscribed
Aim We reconstruct vegetation changes since 12 ky in the Eastern Mediterranean to examine four features of the regional vegetation history that are controversial: the extent of non‐analogue vegetation assemblages in the transition from the Late Glacial to the early Holocene, the synchroneity of postglacial forest expansion, the geographical extent of temperate deciduous forest during the mid‐Holocene and the timing and trigger...
Optimality-based modelling of wheat sowing dates globallyNARA Subscribed
Environmental controls on the light use efficiency of terrestrial gross primary productionNARA Subscribed
Gross primary production (GPP) by terrestrial ecosystems is a key quantity in the global carbon cycle. The instantaneous controls of leaf‐level photosynthesis are well established, but there is still no consensus on the mechanisms by which canopy‐level GPP depends on spatial and temporal variation in the environment. The standard model of photosynthesis provides a robust mechanistic representation for C 3 species; however, add...
A new method based on surface‐sample pollen data for reconstructing palaeovegetation patternsNARA Subscribed
Aim Biomisation has been the most widely used technique to reconstruct past regional vegetation patterns because it does not require an extensive modern pollen dataset. However, it has well‐known limitations including its dependence on expert judgement for the assignment of pollen taxa to plant functional types (PFTs) and PFTs to biomes. Here we present a new method that combines the strengths of biomisation with those of the...
The climatic space of European pollen taxaNARA Subscribed
Pollen data are widely used to reconstruct past climate changes, using relationships between modern pollen abundance in surface samples and climate at the surface‐sample sites as a calibration. Visualization of modern pollen data in multidimensional climate space provides a way to establish that taxon abundances are well behaved before using them in climate reconstructions. Visualization is also helpful for ecological interpre...
Plant respiration is an important contributor to the proposed positive global carbon‐cycle feedback to climate change. However, as a major component, leaf mitochondrial (‘dark’) respiration ( R d ) differs among species adapted to contrasting environments and is known to acclimate to sustained changes in temperature. No accepted theory explains these phenomena or predicts its magnitude. Here we propose that the acclimation of...
TRY plant trait database – enhanced coverage and open accessNARA Subscribed
Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodivers...
We examine issues to consider when reframing conservation science and practice in the context of global change. New framings of the links between ecosystems and society are emerging that are changing peoples’ values and expectations of nature, resulting in plural perspectives on conservation. Reframing conservation for global change can thus be regarded as a stage in the evolving relationship between people and nature rather t...
What have we learnt from palaeoclimate simulations?NARA Subscribed
There has been a gradual evolution in the way that palaeoclimate modelling and palaeoenvironmental data are used together to understand how the Earth System works, from an initial and largely descriptive phase through explicit hypothesis testing to diagnosis of underlying mechanisms. Analyses of past climate states are now regarded as integral to the evaluation of climate models, and have become part of the toolkit used to ass...
Aim The influence of soil properties on photosynthetic traits in higher plants is poorly quantified in comparison with that of climate. We address this situation by quantifying the unique and joint contributions to global leaf‐trait variation from soils and climate. Location Terrestrial ecosystems world‐wide. Methods Using a trait dataset comprising 1509 species from 288 sites, with climate and soil data derived from global da...
Balancing the costs of carbon gain and water transport: testing a new theoretical framework for plant functional ecologyNARA Subscribed
A novel framework is presented for the analysis of ecophysiological field measurements and modelling. The hypothesis ‘ leaves minimise the summed unit costs of transpiration and carboxylation ’ predicts leaf‐internal/ambient CO 2 ratios ( c i /c a ) and slopes of maximum carboxylation rate ( V cmax ) or leaf nitrogen ( N area ) vs . stomatal conductance. Analysis of data on woody species from contrasting climates (cold‐hot, dr...
Predicted responses of transpiration to elevated atmospheric CO 2 concentration ( eCO 2 ) are highly variable amongst process‐based models. To better understand and constrain this variability amongst models, we conducted an intercomparison of 11 ecosystem models applied to data from two forest free‐air CO 2 enrichment ( FACE ) experiments at Duke University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We analysed model structures to ide...
CO 2 fertilization in temperate FACE experiments not representative of boreal and tropical forestsNARA Subscribed
Results from free‐air CO 2 enrichment (FACE) experiments in temperate climates indicate that the response of forest net primary productivity (NPP) to elevated CO 2 might be highly conserved across a broad range of productivities. In this study, we show that the LPJ‐GUESS dynamic vegetation model reproduces the magnitude of the NPP enhancement at temperate forest FACE experiments. A global application of the model suggests that...
Implementing plant hydraulic architecture within the LPJ Dynamic Global Vegetation ModelNARA Subscribed
Aim To implement plant hydraulic architecture within the Lund–Potsdam–Jena Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (LPJ–DGVM), and to test the model against a set of observational data. If the model can reproduce major patterns in vegetation and ecosystem processes, we consider this to be an important linkage between plant physiology and larger‐scale ecosystem dynamics. Location The location is global, geographically distributed. Meth...