Hydro-climatic changes of wetlandscapes across the world

Imenne Åhlén ,Josefin Thorslund ,Luisa Fernanda Ricaurte ,Adnane Labbaci ,Sonia Borja ,Lucia Licero-Villanueva ,Sergey Chalov ,O V Gorelits ,Ylva Sjöberg ,Juan F Blanco ,Constanza Ricaurte-Villota ,Navid Ghajarnia ,Amanda Desormeaux ,Erasmo Rodríguez ,Guillaume Vigouroux ,Jan Pietroń ,Kathryn Mccurley ,П.н Терский ,Kwok Pan Chun ,Fernando Jaramillo ,Nicola Clerici ,Marc Simard ,René M Price ,Sebastián Palomino-Ángel ,Giorgos Maneas ,Jorge Salgado ,Pierre Girard ,Georgia Destouni ,A Rodríguez ,Víctor H Rivera-Monroy ,Amy T Hansen ,John Livsey ,Jesús A Anaya ,Samaneh Seifollahi-Aghmiuni ,Zahra Kalantari ,D Moshir Pahani,B Sannel,David Zamora

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-81137-3

Abstract

Assessments of ecosystem service and function losses of wetlandscapes (i.e., wetlands and their hydrological catchments) suffer from knowledge gaps regarding impacts of ongoing hydro-climatic change. This study investigates hydro-climatic changes during 1976–2015 in 25 wetlandscapes distributed across the world’s tropical, arid, temperate and cold climate zones. Results show that the wetlandscapes were subject to precipitation (P) and temperature (T) changes consistent with mean changes over the world’s land area. However, arid and cold wetlandscapes experienced higher T increases than their respective climate zone. Also, average P decreased in arid and cold wetlandscapes, contrarily to P of arid and cold climate zones, suggesting that these wetlandscapes are located in regions of elevated climate pressures. For most wetlandscapes with available runoff (R) data, the decreases were larger in R than in P, which was attributed to aggravation of climate change impacts by enhanced evapotranspiration losses, e.g. caused by land-use changes.

Highlights

Assessments of ecosystem service and function losses of wetlandscapes suffer from knowledge gaps regarding impacts of ongoing hydro-climatic change
The spread expressed as the interquartile range of ΔP within the tropical climate zone is the largest of all climate zones in absolute terms (Fig. S3, height of grey box), the opposite is true in relative terms (Fig. 2)
Our results show that the mean change in P and T for the studied 25 wetlandscapes are similar to the changes in T and P of the world’s continents

Summary

Introduction

Assessments of ecosystem service and function losses of wetlandscapes (i.e., wetlands and their hydrological catchments) suffer from knowledge gaps regarding impacts of ongoing hydro-climatic change. Of the world’s carbon storage while estuaries and coastal wetlands are important for food provision and biodiversity support Combined, such various wetland ecosystem services and functions can benefit the society, the environment and the economy of a region. A way of approaching this, is to take on a wetlandscape perspective[7, 8], which considers the connected landscape-wetland system defined by the wetlands’ aggregated hydrological catchments Such a perspective is necessary for quantifying (changes in) water balances, and making theoretically sound projections for runoff and water discharges, which are closely related to the evolution of many wetland ecosystem services. The above-described, complex processes have potential implications for biodiversity[14], carbon s equestration[9], water a vailability[15] and water q uality[16] of wetlandscapes, depending on the ambient conditions

Methods

Results

Conclusion