Abstract
Temperatures over the past three decades have exhibited an asymmetric warming pattern between night and day throughout the Tibetan Plateau. However, the implications of such diurnally heterogeneous warming on vegetation growth is still poorly understood. In this paper, we evaluate how vegetation growth has responded to daytime and night-time warming at the regional, biome, and pixel scales based on normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and meteorological data from 1982 to 2015. We found a persistent increase in the growing seasonal minimum temperature (Tmin) and maximum temperature (Tmax) over the Tibetan Plateau between 1982–2015, whereas the rate of increase of Tmin was 1.7 times that of Tmax. After removing the correlations between Tmin, precipitation, and solar radiation, we found that the partial correlation between Tmax and NDVI was positive in wetter and colder areas and negative in semi-arid and arid regions. In contrast, the partial correlation between Tmin and NDVI was positive in high-cold steppe and meadow steppe and negative in montane steppe or wet forest. We also found diverse responses of vegetation type to daytime and night-time warming across the Tibetan Plateau. Our results provide a demonstration for studying regional responses of vegetation to climate extremes under global climate change.
Highlights
As one of the key environmental factors impacting the spatial and temporal distribution of vegetation ecosystems, temperature changes directly alter the vegetation growth environment
Based on the Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies (GIMMS) NDVI3g data from 1982 to 2015, we investigated where and to what extent vegetation growth trends on the Tibetan Plateau have been affected by daytime and night-time warming
Our results suggested that the Tibetan Plateau has experienced a warming trend and the increasing rate of Tmin over the past three decades was much higher than Tmax
Summary
As one of the key environmental factors impacting the spatial and temporal distribution of vegetation ecosystems, temperature changes directly alter the vegetation growth environment. This affects the vegetation growth dynamics and vegetation structure and function [1]. The fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted that the global average temperature is 0.85 ◦C higher than of 1880. The rate of global warming is heterogeneous across spatial scales. The rate of warming for coasts, mountains, and high latitudes is relatively high [3].
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