Early Evidence That Soil Dryness Causes Widespread Decline in Grassland Productivity in China

Abstract

The burning of fossil fuels by humans emits large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and strongly affects the Earth’s carbon balance, with grassland ecosystems changing from weak carbon sinks that were previously close to equilibrium to core carbon sinks. Chinese grasslands are located in typical arid–semi-arid and semi-arid climatic regions, and drought events in the soil and atmosphere can have strong and irreversible consequences on the function and structure of Chinese grassland ecosystems. Based on this, we investigated the response of the gross primary production (GPP) of Chinese grasslands to land–atmosphere moisture constraints, using GPP data simulated through four terrestrial ecosystem models and introduced copula functions and Bayesian equations. The main results were as follows: (1) Soil moisture trends were not significant, and changes were dominated by interannual variability. The detrended warm-season SM correlated with GPP at 0.48 and 0.63 for the historical and future periods, respectively; thus, soil moisture is the critical water stress that regulates interannual variability in Chinese grassland GPP. (2) The positive correlation between shallow SM (0–50 cm) and GPP was higher (r = 0.62). Shallow-soil moisture is the main soil layer that constrains GPP, and the soil moisture decrease in shallow layers is much more likely to cause GPP decline in Chinese grasslands than that in deep-soil water. (3) The probability of GPP decline in Chinese grasslands caused by drought in shallow soils of 0–20 and 20–50 cm is 32.49% and 27.64%, respectively, which is much higher than the probability of GPP decline in deeper soils. In particular, soil drought was more detrimental to grassland GPP in Xinjiang and the Loess Plateau. (4) The probability of soil drought causing GPP decline was higher than that of atmospheric drought during the historical period (1.78–8.19%), but the probability of an atmospheric drought-induced GPP deficit increases significantly in the future and becomes a key factor inhibiting GPP accumulation in some regions (e.g., the Loess Plateau). Our study highlighted the response of grassland ecosystems after the occurrence of soil drought, especially for the shallow-soil-water indicator, which provides important theoretical references for grassland drought disaster emergency prevention and policy formulation.