Vegetation processes are fundamentally limited by nutrient and water availability, the uptake of which is mediated by plant roots in terrestrial ecosystems. While tropical forests play a central role in global water, carbon, and nutrient cycling, we know very little about tradeoffs and synergies in root traits that respond to resource scarcity. Tropical trees face a unique set of resource limitations, with rock-derived nutrients and moisture seasonality governing many ecosystem functions, and nutrient versus water availability often separated spatially and temporally. Root traits that characterize biomass, depth distributions, production and phenology, morphology, physiology, chemistry, and symbiotic relationships can be predictive of plants’ capacities to access and acquire nutrients and water, with links to aboveground processes like transpiration, wood productivity, and leaf phenology. In this review, we identify an emerging trend in the literature that tropical fine root biomass and production in surface soils are greatest in infertile or sufficiently moist soils. We also identify interesting paradoxes in tropical forest root responses to changing resources that merit further exploration. For example, specific root length, which typically increases under resource scarcity to expand the volume of soil explored, instead can increase with greater base cation availability, both across natural tropical forest gradients and in fertilization experiments. Also, nutrient additions, rather than reducing mycorrhizal colonization of fine roots as might be expected, increased colonization rates under scenarios of water scarcity in some forests. Efforts to include fine root traits and functions in vegetation models have grown more sophisticated over time, yet there is a disconnect between the emphasis in models characterizing nutrient and water uptake rates and carbon costs versus the emphasis in field experiments on measuring root biomass, production, and morphology in response to changes in resource availability. Closer integration of field and modeling efforts could connect mechanistic investigation of fine-root dynamics to ecosystem-scale understanding of nutrient and water cycling, allowing us to better predict tropical forest-climate feedbacks.
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Spatial Variation in Catchment Response to Climate Change Depends on Lateral Moisture Transport and Nutrient Dynamics
Future shifts in rainfall, temperature and carbon dioxide (CO2) will impact hydrologic and ecosystem behavior. These changes are expected to vary in space because water and nutrient availability vary with terrain and soil properties, with feedbacks on vegetation and canopy adjustment. However, within‐basin patterns and spatial dependencies of ecohydrologic dynamics have often been ignored in future scenario modeling. We used a distributed process‐based ecohydrologic model, the Regional Hydro‐Ecological Simulation System, as a virtual catchment to examine spatial and temporal variability in climate change response. We found spatial heterogeneity in Leaf Area Index, transpiration and soil saturation trends, with some scenarios even showing opposite trends in different locations. For example, in a drying scenario, decreased vegetation productivity in water‐limited upslope areas enhanced downslope nutrient subsidies so that productivity increased in the nutrient‐limited riparian zone. In scenarios with both warming and rising CO2, amplifying feedbacks between mineralization, vegetation water use efficiency and litter fall led to large increases in growth that were often strongest in the riparian area (depending on the coincident rainfall change). Modeled transpiration trends were determined by the competing effects of vegetation growth and changing water use efficiency. Overall, the riparian zone experienced substantially different (and even opposing) ecohydrologic trends compared to the rest of the catchment, which is important because productive riparian areas often contribute a disproportionate amount of vegetation growth, transpiration and nutrient consumption to catchment totals. Models that are spatially lumped, lack key ecosystem‐driving dynamics, or ignore lateral transport could misrepresent the complex ecohydrologic changes catchments could experience in the future.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10377161
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.1029
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Water Resources Research
- Volume:
- 58
- Issue:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 0043-1397
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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