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Stand age and species richness dampen interannual variation of ecosystem-level photosynthetic capacity

A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 11 February 2019

This article has been updated

Abstract

The total uptake of carbon dioxide by ecosystems via photosynthesis (gross primary productivity, GPP) is the largest flux in the global carbon cycle. A key ecosystem functional property determining GPP is the photosynthetic capacity at light saturation (GPPsat), and its interannual variability (IAV) is propagated to the net land–atmosphere exchange of CO2. Given the importance of understanding the IAV in CO2 fluxes for improving the predictability of the global carbon cycle, we have tested a range of alternative hypotheses to identify potential drivers of the magnitude of IAV in GPPsat in forest ecosystems. Our results show that while the IAV in GPPsat within sites is closely related to air temperature and soil water availability fluctuations, the magnitude of IAV in GPPsat is related to stand age and biodiversity (R2 = 0.55, P < 0.0001). We find that the IAV of GPPsat is greatly reduced in older and more diverse forests, and is higher in younger forests with few dominant species. Older and more diverse forests seem to dampen the effect of climate variability on the carbon cycle irrespective of forest type. Preserving old forests and their diversity would therefore be beneficial in reducing the effect of climate variability on Earth's forest ecosystems.

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Figure 1: Relationship of cvGPPsat with stand age and species richness.
Figure 2: Relationship of species richness with stand age and cvGPPsat.
Figure 3: Frequency distribution of the distance correlation coefficients computed between the annual ecosystem photosynthetic capacity (GPPsat) and the environmental variables WAI and Tair (n = 50).

Change history

  • 11 February 2019

    In the version of this Article originally published, the wrong Supplementary Information pdf was uploaded, in which the figures did not correspond with those mentioned in the main text and the R code was not presented properly. This has now been replaced.

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Acknowledgements

From Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry we thank U. Weber, M. Jung for providing data, and K. Morris and R. Nair for a language check. We thank P. Jassal from the University of British Columbia and Jens Schumacher from University of Jena for their helpful comments. The authors T.M., M.M., M.D.M., J.K., C.W. and M.R. affiliated with the MPI BGC acknowledge funding by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 project BACI under grant agreement no. 640176. This work used eddy covariance data acquired and shared by the FLUXNET community, including these networks: AmeriFlux, AfriFlux, AsiaFlux, CarboAfrica, CarboEuropeIP, CarboItaly, CarboMont, ChinaFlux, Fluxnet-Canada, GreenGrass, ICOS, KoFlux, LBA, NECC, OzFlux-TERN, TCOS-Siberia and USCCC. The ERA-Interim reanalysis data are provided by ECMWF and processed by LSCE. The FLUXNET eddy covariance data processing and harmonization was carried out by the European Fluxes Database Cluster, AmeriFlux Management Project, and Fluxdata project of FLUXNET, with the support of CDIAC and ICOS Ecosystem Thematic Center, and the OzFlux, ChinaFlux and AsiaFlux offices. T.M. acknowledges the International Max Planck Research School for global biogeochemical cycles.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

T.M. wrote the manuscript and performed the analysis. T.M., M.M., M.D.M. and M.R. designed the study. M.M., M.D.M., M.R., J.K., I.J., A.K., A.C., C.W., T.A.B. and A.V. discussed the interpretation of the results. M.M., M.D.M., M.R., J.K., C.W., T.A.B., A.C., A.K., D.L. and O.R. contributed significantly to editing the paper. S.R., R.T. and D.G. contributed to editing the paper. T.A.B., I.J., A.K., D.L., O.R., A.V., S.R., A.C., H.K. and T.F. contributed data.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Talie Musavi.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary information

Supplementary Figures 1–11; Supplementary Tables 1–2 (PDF 1425 kb)

Supplementary R code

R code used in analyses (PDF 1040 kb)

Supplementary Dataset 1

Information on the sites used in this study including site identifier (site.code), coefficient of variation of GPPsat (cvGPPsat), Number of years with data (No_years), number of abundant species at the sites (Sp.no90), stand age (Age), plant functional type (PFT), Climate Group, canopy height (Height), canopy cover, nutrient availability classes (Nutrient_availability), cv of leaf area index (cvLAI), mean of LAI (mean.LAI), maximum LAI (LAI max), standard deviation of growing season water availability index (sdWAI), sd of growing season air temperature (sdTair), sd of growing season cumulative precipitation (sdPrecip), latitude (LAT), longitude (LONG). (CSV 10 kb)

Supplementary Dataset 2

Annual information on the GPPsat, leaf area index (LAI), mean growing season air temperature (avgTair), mean growing season cumulative precipitation (avgPrecip), mean growing season water availability index (avgWAI). site.code is the identifier of the sites. (CSV 31 kb)

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Musavi, T., Migliavacca, M., Reichstein, M. et al. Stand age and species richness dampen interannual variation of ecosystem-level photosynthetic capacity. Nat Ecol Evol 1, 0048 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-016-0048

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