Coupled Biospheric Synchrony of the Coastal Temperate Ecosystem in Northern Patagonia: A Remote Sensing Analysis

Carlos Lara,Gonzalo S Saldías,Álvaro L Paredes,Bernard Cazelles,Bernardo R Broitman,Raúl P Flores

doi:10.3390/rs11182092

Abstract

Over the last century, climate change has impacted the physiology, distribution, and phenology of marine and terrestrial primary producers worldwide. The study of these fluctuations has been hindered due to the complex response of plants to environmental forcing over large spatial and temporal scales. To bridge this gap, we investigated the synchrony in seasonal phenological activity between marine and terrestrial primary producers to environmental and climatic variability across northern Patagonia. We disentangled the effects on the biological activity of local processes using advanced time-frequency analysis and partial wavelet coherence on 15 years (2003–2017) of data from MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) onboard the Terra and Aqua satellites and global climatic variability using large-scale climate indices. Our results show that periodic variations in both coastal ocean and land productivity are associated with sea surface temperature forcing over seasonal scales and with climatic forcing over multi-annual (2–4 years) modes. These complex relationships indicate that large-scale climatic processes primarily modulate the synchronous phenological seasonal activity across northern Patagonia, which makes these unique ecosystems highly exposed to future climatic change.

Highlights

Over the last century, climate change has altered the physiology, distribution and phenology of marine and terrestrial species across the planet [1,2]
The annual component was significant during 2006–2008 and 2012–2016 periods (Figure 2C), while different dominant periods were observed in the southern area; the local wavelet power spectrum (WPS) showed a semiannual period during 2006–2007 and 2015–2017 intervals, and an annual periodic oscillation during the 2011 and 2015–2017 intervals
The temporal dynamics of Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) in both northern and southern areas (EVI–North and EVI–South)showed that the annual mode persisted throughout the study period (Figure 2E,F)

Summary

Introduction

Climate change has altered the physiology, distribution and phenology of marine and terrestrial species across the planet [1,2]. The imprint of climatic variability on phenological patterns such as flowering, fruiting and migration rates changes across functional groups and trophic levels [3,4,5]. The seasonal variation of environmental drivers imposes its rhythms and phenological synchrony, where spatio-temporal fluctuations of different ecological patterns are locked in phase across different ecosystems [6,7,8]. A substantial body of literature documents that different populations are influenced by coherent environmental fluctuations (e.g., [2,3,9,10,11,12,13,14]). Evaluating the effects of climate variation on the intraguild-predation structure of the fish population in the Windermere lake, Edeline et al [12] show that the pathogen-induced regime shift is temperature-controlled. Regional changes in zooplankton biomass and the duration of upwelling events vary coherently along the Northwest Iberian shelf [13], while on a global scale, spatial synchrony in chlorophyll concentration has been reported for the world’s oceans [14]

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