Abstract
Wetlands play a critical role in global hydrological and biogeochemical cycles. Regulating the regional climate is one of the most important ecosystem services of natural wetlands. However, the impact of wetlands on local temperature on the global scale and the attribution is still unclear. This study utilizes the satellite-based products (land surface temperature (LST), albedo, and evapotranspiration (ET)) to evaluate the difference in LST between wetlands and their adjacent landcover types and the possible drivers. Here we show that on average for the whole year, wetlands have a cooling effect in tropical regions, but have a warming effect in boreal regions. The impacts of wetlands on LST show great seasonality in the boreal regions; i.e., the wetlands have a warming effect in winter but a cooling effect in summer. The difference in albedo and ET between wetlands and the other landcover types only interprets 30% of temporal variation of the difference in LST. Due to the large water storage in wetlands, the ground heat flux (G) may interpret the rest of the impact, absorbing energy in summer and releasing energy in winter in wetlands, which has often been neglected in previous studies. Our results indicate that it is critical to comprehensively consider the effects of wetland restoration in different regions to realize potential climatic benefits in the future.
Highlights
Wetlands cover only 10% (13.0 million km2 ) of the world’s land surface area [1], but exert critical impacts on global hydrological and biogeochemical cycles, as well as biodiversity conservation [2,3,4,5]
The global pattern of ∆land surface temperature (LST) between wetlands and other landcover types provides an important insight that the overall behavior of wetlands throughout the year has a warming effect in boreal regions but a cooling effect in the tropical regions
In this study, using satellite-based datasets, we show the global patterns of annual and seasonal ∆LST between wetlands and other landcover types, as well as ∆albedo and
Summary
Wetlands cover only 10% (13.0 million km2 ) of the world’s land surface area [1], but exert critical impacts on global hydrological and biogeochemical cycles, as well as biodiversity conservation [2,3,4,5]. Due to climate change and the intensifying human activities, both satellite images and wetland inventories suggest a decline in the area of natural wetlands around the world [6,7,8]. Some essential ecosystem services of natural wetlands such as water purification, flood control, and climate regulation could be jeopardized. Identifying and understanding the ecosystem services of natural wetlands is critical to sustainable development goals [9]
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