Some aspects of interrelations between terrestrial ecosystems and the changing climate

Abstract

Issues of interrelations between climate and land ecosystems (mainly, their basic component: vegetative land cover) are considered in the paper. The hysteresis effect, which manifests itself in the dynamics of biome boundaries, is described on both a global and a regional scale and based on data analysis of the primary production of aboveground phytomass and evaporability. The work helps reveal centers of interannual stability of the onset of phenological events throughout the territory of European Russia and study regularities in their shifts during the vegetation period. The interannual temporal variability in the onset of natural events is shown to remain within the range of climatic variables. It is established that the temporal patterns for the onset of many spring events have advanced to earlier dates over the past decades (whereas those for autumn events have shifted to later dates) and the vegetation periods have extended, e.g., by more than ten additional days in the northern part of European Russia. However, phenological responses to global warming show differences across regions and groups of organisms, which evidences that the biota responds as a whole to present-day climate changes in different ways.