Abstract
Memory effects refer to the impacts of antecedent climate conditions on current vegetation productivity. This temporal linkage has been found to be strong in arid and semi-arid regions. However, the dominant climatic factors that determine such patterns are still unclear. Here, we defined’water-memory effects’ as the persistent effects of antecedent precipitation on the vegetation productivity for a given memory length (from 1 to up to 12 months). Based on satellite observations and climate data, we quantified the length of water-memory effects and evaluated the contributions of antecedent precipitation on current vegetation. Our results showed that vegetation productivity was highly dependent on antecedent precipitation in arid and semi-arid regions. The average length of water memory was approximately 5.6 months. Globally, water-memory effects could explain the geographical pattern and strength of memory effects, indicating that precipitation might be the dominant climatic factor determining memory effects because of its impact on water availability. Moreover, our results showed vegetation in regions with low mean annual precipitation or a longer water memory has lower engineering resilience (i.e. slower recovery rate) to disturbances. These findings will enable better assessment of memory effects and improve our understanding of the vulnerability of vegetation to climate change.
Highlights
Memory effects can be defined as the dependence of vegetation productivity on both contemporary disturbances and the residual effects of past climate conditions[1,2,3,4]
We aim to (1) determine the period during which past precipitation significantly influenced the current state of vegetation productivity, i.e., water memory length; (2) evaluate the contributions of within-memory precipitation to memory effects and investigate the reason why stronger memory effects are observed in global arid and semi-arid regions; and (3) investigate the relationship between precipitation/ water memory length and ecosystem engineering resilience at the global scale to improve our understanding of vegetation resilience
Note that we removed all areas where the percentage of missing values in the Climate Research Unit (CRU) climate datasets was greater than 5% based on the station files (Fig. S1)
Summary
Memory effects can be defined as the dependence of vegetation productivity on both contemporary disturbances and the residual effects of past climate conditions[1,2,3,4]. Verbesselt et al.[25], adopted this method using satellite observations and found that tropical forests in drier regions exhibit slower recovery rates and inferred that these areas had lower ecological resilience This finding suggested that precipitation could be an important mechanism underlying tropical forest resilience. We aim to (1) determine the period during which past precipitation significantly influenced the current state of vegetation productivity, i.e., water memory length; (2) evaluate the contributions of within-memory precipitation (i.e., accumulated precipitation within the water memory length) to memory effects and investigate the reason why stronger memory effects are observed in global arid and semi-arid regions; and (3) investigate the relationship between precipitation/ water memory length and ecosystem engineering resilience at the global scale to improve our understanding of vegetation resilience
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