Warming trends in Patagonian subantartic forest

Abstract

The forests in the Aysén region (ca. 43–49 °S, Chile) have a high degree of wilderness and cover more than 4.8 million hectares, making it one of the largest areas of subantarctic forest in the Southern Hemisphere. The impact of global warming on this region is poorly documented. The main objective of this work was to analyze the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), land surface temperature (LST) and precipitation over Aysen forests in the context of ongoing global warming. We used average monthly images of LST and NDVI derived from the MODIS sensor covering the period 2001–2016 and precipitation from gridded datasets. The Aysén region was divided into three nested spatial scales: i) regional, ii) regional considering only forests, iii) local scale considering an evergreen subantarctic forest area covering around 5 × 5 km and a local deciduous forest area (dominated by Nothofagus pumilio). Trend analysis showed a warming rate of +0.78 K/decade (p ≤ 0.05) over the subantarctic forest zone, greening of +0.01/decade for NDVI (p ≤ 0.05) over the western zone, and a drying trend (p ≤ 0.05) over the eastern zone. The minimum temperature anomalies showed an increase of about 4.5 K during the period under analysis. LST, NDVI and precipitation were also analyzed here. The recent trends in temperature, greening and precipitation over the forests of Aysén detected in this research contribute to a better understanding of global warming impacts on subantarctic forests in the southern tip of South America. Nevertheless, to get a better estimation of the impact of global warming at multiple scales is needed to have better quality and quantity of data in situ.