Abstract
Forests in the Tibetan Plateau are thought to be vulnerable to climate extremes, yet they also tend to exhibit resilience contributing to the maintenance of ecosystem services in and beyond the plateau. So far the spatiotemporal pattern in tree resilience in the Tibetan Plateau remains largely unquantified and the influence of specific factors on the resilience is poorly understood. Here, we study ring‐width data from 849 trees at 28 sites in the Tibetan Plateau with the aim to quantify tree resilience and determine their diving forces. Three extreme drought events in years 1969, 1979, and 1995 are detected from metrological records. Regional tree resistance to the three extreme droughts shows a decreasing trend with the proportion of trees having high resistance ranging from 71.9%, 55.2%, to 39.7%. Regional tree recovery is increasing with the proportion of trees having high recovery ranging from 28.3%, 52.2%, to 64.2%. The area with high resistance is contracting and that of high recovery is expanding. The spatiotemporal resistance and recovery are associated with moisture availability and diurnal temperature range, respectively. In addition, they are both associated with forest internal factor represented by growth consistence among trees. We conclude that juniper trees in the Tibetan Plateau have increased resilience to extreme droughts in the study period. We highlight pervasive resilience in juniper trees. The results have implications for predicting tree resilience and identifying areas vulnerable to future climate extremes.
Highlights
Extreme drought events have had serious impacts on tree growth in recent decades (Ciais et al, 2005; Trumbore, Brando, & Hartmann, 2015) and are expected to have even more severe effects with climate warming (Trenberth et al, 2014)
We address the spatial resilience to droughts using our accumulation of tree‐ring data across the forests in the Tibetan Plateau
We considered that the tree resilience is reflected by trees’ resistance to perturbation and their ability to recover to the original conditions
Summary
Extreme drought events have had serious impacts on tree growth in recent decades (Ciais et al, 2005; Trumbore, Brando, & Hartmann, 2015) and are expected to have even more severe effects with climate warming (Trenberth et al, 2014). Spatial heterogeneity of habitats in forested landscapes results in differences in resilience among tree stands. The tree response to drought is an eco‐physiological process, allowing different growth performance in individual trees depending on their extrinsic (e.g., habitat and competition) and intrinsic (e.g., health and genetic) factors (Willis, Jeffers, & Tovar, 2018) Embedded in this process is tree resilience which could be evaluated by comparing ring‐widths prior to, during, and after drought events. These tree‐ring chronologies are the mean growth of trees in the forest, with no regard to difference among individual trees To date, it remains unclear how the spatial tree resilience changes in historical disturbances. The study aimed to answer two questions: (a) How does the spatial resilience change over time? and (b) What determines the variation of tree resilience?
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