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Deforestation-induced warming over tropical mountain regions regulated by elevation

Nature Geoscience volume 14, pages 23–29 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Agriculture is expanding in tropical mountainous areas, yet its climatic effect is poorly understood. Here, we investigate how elevation regulates the biophysical climate impacts of deforestation over tropical mountainous areas by integrating satellite-observed forest cover changes into a high-resolution land–atmosphere coupled model. We show that recent forest conversion between 2000 and 2014 increased the regional warming by 0.022 ± 0.002 °C in the Southeast Asian Massif, 0.010 ± 0.007 °C in the Barisan Mountains (Maritime Southeast Asia), 0.042 ± 0.010 °C in the Serra da Espinhaço (South America) and 0.047 ± 0.008 °C in the Albertine Rift mountains (Africa) during the local dry season. The deforestation-driven local temperature anomaly can reach up to 2 °C where forest conversion is extensive. The warming from mountain deforestation depends on elevation, through the intertwined and opposing effects of increased albedo causing cooling and decreased evapotranspiration causing warming. As the elevation increases, the albedo effect increases in importance and the warming effect decreases, analogous to previously highlighted decreases of deforestation-induced warming with increasing latitude. As most new croplands are encroaching lands at low to moderate elevations, deforestation produces higher warming from suppressed evapotranspiration. Impacts of this additional warming on crop yields, land degradation and biodiversity of nearby intact ecosystems should be incorporated into future assessments.

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Fig. 1: Simulated temperature change resulting from deforestation in tropical mountains.
Fig. 2: Temperature change versus percentage of forest loss for 2000–2014 at the grid level.
Fig. 3: Regulation by elevation of the deforestation-induced warming over mountains.
Fig. 4: Mechanisms causing the elevation regulation of the deforestation-driven warming effect in SE1.

Data availability

Data on satellite-observed high-resolution forest cover change in the twenty-first century are available at http://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest. GSOD surface air temperature data are available at ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod. The ERA5 reanalysis product is available at https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/. The FNL reanalysis product is available at https://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds083.2. All of the datasets are also available on request from Z.Z.

Code availability

We used the programmes MATLAB (R2014a) and ArcGIS (10.4) to generate all of the results. Analysis scripts are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13280150.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by Lamsam-Thailand Sustain Development (B0891), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42071022, 42001321), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2020M672693), the start-up fund provided by the Southern University of Science and Technology (29/Y01296122) and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA20060401). P.C. acknowledges support from the European Research Council Synergy project SyG-2013-610028 IMBALANCE-P and the ANR CLAND Convergence Institute. D.C. was supported by Swedish BECC and MERGE. We thank Della Research Computing at Princeton University and the Taiyi Supercomputer at the Southern University of Science and Technology for providing computing resources. We sincerely appreciate D. S. Wilcove for constructive comments on this paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China

    Zhenzhong Zeng, Dashan Wang, Jie Wu, Yu Feng & Chunmiao Zheng

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Zhenzhong Zeng, Maofeng Liu, Ming Pan, Liqing Peng, Peirong Lin, Drew Gower & Eric F. Wood

  3. School of Geography and Ocean Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Long Yang

  4. Department of Geoscience and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Jie Wu

  5. Faculty of Fisheries Technology and Aquatic Resources, Maejo University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

    Alan D. Ziegler

  6. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, CEA/CNRS/UVSQ, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Philippe Ciais

  7. Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Timothy D. Searchinger

  8. Department of Geological Sciences, Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Zong-Liang Yang

  9. Regional Climate Group, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Deliang Chen

  10. Department of Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Anping Chen

  11. Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Sorbonne Université, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France

    Laurent Z. X. Li

  12. Sino-French Institute for Earth System Science, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Shilong Piao & Xu Lian

  13. Geography Department, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    David Taylor

  14. Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Xitian Cai

  15. Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Kaiyu Guan

  16. Key Laboratory of Alpine Ecology and Biodiversity, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Tao Wang

  17. Department of Geography and Resource Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Lang Wang

  18. Department of Environmental Planning, Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Su-Jong Jeong

  19. River and Environmental Engineering Laboratory, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Zhongwang Wei

  20. Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai), Zhuhai, China

    Zhongwang Wei

  21. Guangdong Province Key Laboratory for Climate Change and Natural Disaster Studies, School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

    Zhongwang Wei

  22. School of Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    Justin Sheffield

  23. Department of Geography, Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Kelly Caylor

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  1. Zhenzhong Zeng
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Contributions

Z.Z. designed the research and wrote the draft. Z.Z. and D.W. performed the analysis. Z.Z., D.W., L.Y. and M.L. performed the numerical simulations. All of the authors contributed to interpretation of the results and writing of the paper.

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Correspondence to Zhenzhong Zeng.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Primary Handling Editors: Tamara Goldin; Xujia Jiang.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–17 and Tables 1 and 2.

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Zeng, Z., Wang, D., Yang, L. et al. Deforestation-induced warming over tropical mountain regions regulated by elevation. Nat. Geosci. 14, 23–29 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-020-00666-0

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