Reply on RC1

Abstract

Droughts affect terrestrial ecosystems directly and concurrently, and can additionally induce lagged effects in subsequent seasons and years. Such legacy effects of drought on vegetation growth and state have been widely studied in tree-ring records and satellite-based vegetation greenness, while legacies on ecosystem carbon fluxes are still poorly quantified and understood. Here, we focus on two ecosystem monitoring sites in central Germany with similar climate but characterized by different species and age structures. Using eddy-covariance measurements, we detect legacies on gross primary productivity (GPP) by calculating the difference between random-forest model estimates of potential GPP and observed GPP. Our results showed that at both sites, droughts caused significant legacy effects on GPP at seasonal and annual time scales which were partly explained by reduced leaf development. The GPP reduction due to drought legacy effects is of comparable magnitude to the concurrent drought effects, but differed between two neighbouring forests with divergent species and age structures. The methodology proposed here allows quantifying the temporal dynamics of legacy effects at the sub-seasonal scale and separating legacy effects from model uncertainties. Application of the methodology at a larger range of sites will help quantify whether the identified lag effects are general and on which factors they may depend.