Earlier snowmelt may lead to late season declines in plant productivity and carbon sequestration in Arctic tundra ecosystems

Abstract

Arctic warming is affecting snow cover and soil hydrology, with consequences for carbon sequestration in tundra ecosystems. The scarcity of observations in the Arctic has limited our understanding of the impact of covarying environmental drivers on the carbon balance of tundra ecosystems. In this study, we address some of these uncertainties through a novel record of 119 site-years of summer data from eddy covariance towers representing dominant tundra vegetation types located on continuous permafrost in the Arctic. Here we found that earlier snowmelt was associated with more tundra net CO2 sequestration and higher gross primary productivity (GPP) only in June and July, but with lower net carbon sequestration and lower GPP in August. Although higher evapotranspiration (ET) can result in soil drying with the progression of the summer, we did not find significantly lower soil moisture with earlier snowmelt, nor evidence that water stress affected GPP in the late growing season. Our results suggest that the expected increased CO2 sequestration arising from Arctic warming and the associated increase in growing season length may not materialize if tundra ecosystems are not able to continue sequestering CO2 later in the season.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Zona, D. Lafleur, P.M. Hufkens, K. Bailey, B. Gioli, B. Burba, G. Goodrich, J.P. Liljedahl, A.K. Euskirchen, E.S. Watts, J.D. Farina, M. Kimball, J.S. Heimann, M. Göckede, M. Pallandt, M. Christensen, T.R. Mastepanov, M. López-Blanco, E. Jackowicz-Korczynski, M. Dolman, A.J. Marchesini, L.B. Commane, R. Wofsy, S.C. Miller, C.E. Lipson, D.A. Hashemi, J. Arndt, K.A. Kutzbach, L. Holl, D. Boike, J. Wille, C. Sachs, T. Kalhori, A. Song, X. Xu, X. Humphreys, E.R. Koven, C.D. Sonnentag, O. Meyer, G. Gosselin, G.H. Marsh, P. Oechel, W.C.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2022 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Published: 21 March 2022 Published (online): 21 March 2022 Accepted: 14 February 2022
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) > Department of Animal and Plant Sciences (Sheffield)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	28 Mar 2022 09:58
Last Modified:	28 Mar 2022 09:58
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer Nature
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41598-022-07561-1
Related URLs:	PubMed URL
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:185165

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Earlier snowmelt may lead to late season declines in plant productivity and carbon sequestration in Arctic tundra ecosystems

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