Abstract
Plant traits are both responsive to local climate and strong predictors of primary productivity. We hypothesized that future climate change might promote a shift in global plant traits resulting in changes in Gross Primary Productivity (GPP). We characterized the relationship between key plant traits, namely Specific Leaf Area (SLA), height, and seed mass, and local climate and primary productivity. We found that by 2070, tropical and arid ecosystems will be more suitable for plants with relatively lower canopy height, SLA and seed mass, while far northern latitudes will favor woody and taller plants than at present. Using a network of tower eddy covariance CO2 flux measurements and the extrapolated plant trait maps, we estimated the global distribution of annual GPP under current and projected future plant community distribution. We predict that annual GPP in northern biomes (≥45 °N) will increase by 31% (+8.1 ± 0.5 Pg C), but this will be offset by a 17.9% GPP decline in the tropics (−11.8 ± 0.84 Pg C). These findings suggest that regional climate changes will affect plant trait distributions, which may in turn affect global productivity patterns.
Highlights
Climate change is expected to significantly influence global species distributions in the decades[1,2], which raises the question of how these changes may affect dominant plant community traits and ecosystem productivity
Via analyses of annual Gross Primary Productivity (GPP) derived from 164 globally distributed carbon flux towers, we show that ecosystem productivity is significantly related to the plant trait observations
The bioclimatic variables selected are based on stepwise variable selection and the best performance [Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC)[44] and lowest Root Mean Squared Errors (RMSE)] indicated from a leave-one-out cross validation analysis
Summary
Climate change is expected to significantly influence global species distributions in the decades[1,2], which raises the question of how these changes may affect dominant plant community traits and ecosystem productivity. In order to evaluate how vegetation structure and ecosystem productivity may respond as a result of future climate change, we projected the GAM simulated plant traits using climate variables derived from 17 CMIP5 ESMs (Table S2) for the year 2070 based on the RCP8.5 greenhouse gas concentration trajectory[42].
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