Abstract
Forest gain in the tropics can cool the land surface by altering the energy budget through biophysical processes. Many countries have adopted forestation as part of their strategies for tackling climate warming. However, the biophysical effects of forest gain have generally been estimated based on the symmetrical reversal of ongoing tropical forest loss. Here we use multiple sources of satellite remote sensing data to explore the sensitivities of land surface temperature to forest gain and loss, and find forest loss warming the surface by 0.56 ± 0.12 °C and forest gain cooling the surface by 0.10 ± 0.09 °C. This asymmetry indicates weaker biophysical effects of forest gain on local temperature, which we attribute to contrasting changes of vegetation properties, such as leaf area and greenness. We find that current Earth system models fail to capture the observed asymmetry and thus could overestimate the cooling effect of afforestation in future. This highlights the need to improve representation of forest demographic impacts on biophysics-related vegetation properties, such as leaf area index, albedo and canopy structure, to better estimate the effects of tropical forestation on surface temperature.
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Data availability
All data used in the study are open access: MODIS MYD11A2 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/myd11a2v061/); MODIS MOD11A2 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mod11a2v061/); GFCC (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/gfcc30tcv003/); Hansen GFC (https://storage.googleapis.com/earthenginepartners-hansen/GFC-2020-v1.8/download.html); MODIS MOD44B (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mod44bv061/); MODIS MCD12Q1 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mcd12q1v061/); ESA CCI land cover (http://maps.elie.ucl.ac.be/CCI/viewer/download.php); Hilda+ land cover (https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.921846); GlobeLand30 (https://www.cnopendata.com/en/data/m/meteorological/china-globeLand30.html); SRTMGL3 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/srtmgl3v003/); MODIS MYD15A2H (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/myd15a2hv061/); MODIS MCD43A4 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mcd43a4v061/); MODIS MYD13A1 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/myd13a1v061/); MODIS MYD16A2 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/myd16a2v006/); MODIS MCD43A3 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mcd43a3v061/); GEDI forest canopy height (https://glad.umd.edu/dataset/gedi/); AGB from ref. 28 (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6103053); and CMIP6 (https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/cmip6/). Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
The codes used to analyse data and create the figures are available via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25239877 (ref. 66). All the processing codes are available from the corresponding author on request.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (grant no. 2019YFA0607302) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 42171096). We also acknowledge the support by the High-performance Computing Platform of Peking University.
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X.W. designed the research. Y.Z. performed analyses and drafted the figures. Y.Z., X.W. and X.L. wrote the manuscript with help from S.L., Y.L., C.C. and S.P. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the results.
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Nature Geoscience thanks Edouard Davin, Shruti Nath and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Tom Richardson, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.
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Zhang, Y., Wang, X., Lian, X. et al. Asymmetric impacts of forest gain and loss on tropical land surface temperature. Nat. Geosci. 17, 426–432 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01423-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01423-3