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Introduction
Publications
Publications (624)
The land sink of anthropogenic carbon emissions, a crucial component of mitigating climate change, is primarily attributed to the CO₂ fertilization effect on global gross primary productivity (GPP). However, direct observational evidence of this effect remains scarce, hampered by challenges in disentangling the CO₂ fertilization effect from other l...
Droughts can impact terrestrial ecosystems concurrently but also lagged in time as legacy effects. Although drought legacy effects on plants have been thoroughly shown using tree radial growth and greenness, understanding of legacy effects on gross primary productivity (GPP) remains limited. Here, we quantify for the first time drought legacy effec...
It is known from arid and semi-arid ecosystems that atmospheric water vapor is directly adsorbed by the soil matrix during the night. Soil water vapor adsorption was typically neglected and only recently got attention because of improvements in measurement techniques. One technique rarely explored is eddy covariance (EC). EC nighttime measurements...
Natural and anthropogenic disturbances are important drivers of tree mortality, shaping the structure, composition, and biomass distribution of forest ecosystems. Differences in disturbance regimes, characterized by the frequency, extent, and intensity of disturbance events, result in structurally different landscapes. Characterizing different dist...
Vegetation plays a fundamental role in modulating the exchange of water, energy, and carbon fluxes between the land and the atmosphere. These exchanges are modeled by Land Surface Models (LSMs), which are an essential part of numerical weather prediction and data assimilation. However, most current LSMs implemented specifically in weather forecasti...
In their commentary, Xiao et al. cautioned that the conclusions on the critical role of microbial carbon use efficiency (CUE) in global soil organic carbon (SOC) storage in a paper by Tao et al. (2023) might be too simplistic. They claimed that Tao et al.’s study lacked mechanistic consideration of SOC formation and excluded important datasets. Xia...
Existing methods for fine-scale air quality assessment have significant gaps in their reliability. Purely data-driven methods lack any physically-based mechanisms to simulate the interactive process of air pollution, potentially leading to physically inconsistent or implausible results. Here, we report a hybrid multilevel graph neural network that...
Quantifying changes in hot temperature extremes is key for developing adaptation strategies. Changes in hot extremes are often determined on the basis of air temperatures; however, hydrology and many biogeochemical processes are more sensitive to soil temperature. Here we show that soil hot extremes are increasing faster than air hot extremes by 0....
Heatwaves are weather hazards that can influence societal and natural systems. Recently, heatwaves have increased in frequency, duration, and intensity, and this trend is projected to continue as a consequence of climate change. The study of heatwaves is hampered by the lack of a common definition, which limits comparability between studies. This a...
Climate extremes are on the rise. Impacts of extreme climate and weather events on ecosystem services and ultimately human well-being can be partially attenuated by the organismic, structural, and functional diversity of the affected land surface. However, the ongoing transformation of terrestrial ecosystems through intensified exploitation and man...
Heat extremes have severe implications for human health, ecosystems and the initiation of wildfires. Whereas they are mostly introduced by atmospheric circulation patterns, the intensity of heat extremes is modulated by vegetation functioning associated with soil moisture availability. Thereby, vegetation provides evaporative cooling through transp...
In the accompanying Comment, He et al. argue that the determinant role of microbial carbon use efficiency in global soil organic carbon (SOC) storage shown in Tao et al. (2023) was overestimated because carbon inputs were neglected in our data analysis while they suggest that our model-based analysis could be biased and model-dependent. Their argum...
Global collections of synthesized flux tower data such as FLUXNET have accelerated scientific progress beyond the eddy covariance community. However, remaining data issues in FLUXNET data pose challenges for users, particularly for multi-site synthesis and modeling activities. Here we present complementary consistency flags (C2F) for flux tower dat...
The response of vegetation physiology to drought at large spatial scales is poorly understood due to a lack of direct observations. Here, we study vegetation drought responses related to photosynthesis, evaporation, and vegetation water content using remotely sensed data, and we isolate physiological responses using a machine learning technique. We...
Drought's intensity and duration have increased in many regions over the last decades. However, the propagation of drought‐induced water deficits through the terrestrial water cycle is not fully understood at a global scale. Here we study responses of monthly evaporation (ET) and runoff to soil moisture droughts occurring between 2001 and 2015 usin...
Fundamental axes of variation in plant traits result from trade-offs between costs and benefits of resource-use strategies at the leaf scale. However, it is unclear whether similar trade-offs propagate to the ecosystem level. Here, we test whether trait correlation patterns predicted by three well-known leaf- and plant-level coordination theories –...
While the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 mole fractions can be measured with high accuracy, there are still large uncertainties in the attribution of this growth to diverse anthropogenic and natural sources and sinks. One major source of uncertainty is the net flux of carbon dioxide from the biosphere to the atmosphere, the Net Ecosystem Exchange (...
Both the frequency and intensity of hot temperature extremes are expected to increase in the coming decades, challenging various socio-economic sectors including public health. Thereby, societal attention data available in real time, such as Google search attention, could help monitor heat wave impacts in domains with lagged data availability. Here...
Soils store more carbon than other terrestrial ecosystems1,2. How soil organic carbon (SOC) forms and persists remains uncertain1,3, which makes it challenging to understand how it will respond to climatic change3,4. It has been suggested that soil microorganisms play an important role in SOC formation, preservation and loss5–7. Although microorgan...
Compound heat waves and drought events draw our particular attention as they become more frequent. Co-occurring extreme events often exacerbate impacts on ecosystems and can induce a cascade of detrimental consequences. However, the research to understand these events is still in its infancy. DeepExtremes is a project funded by the European Space A...
Current strategies to hold surface warming below a certain level, e.g. , 1.5 or 2 °C, advocate limiting total anthropogenic carbon emissions to ∼0.9 or ∼1.25 Eg C (10 ¹⁸ grams carbon), respectively 1,2 . These allowable emission budgets are based on a near-linear relationship between cumulative emissions and warming identified in various modeling e...
Terrestrial water storage (TWS) is an integrative hydrological state that is key for our understanding of the global water cycle. The TWS observation from the GRACE missions has, therefore, been instrumental in the calibration and validation of hydrological models and understanding the variations in the hydrological storage. The models, however, st...
Vegetation plays a fundamental role in modulating the exchange of water, energy, and carbon fluxes between the land and the atmosphere. These exchanges are modelled by Land Surface Models (LSMs), which are an essential part of numerical weather prediction and data assimilation. However, most current LSMs implemented specifically in weather forecast...
Hot temperature extremes are changing in intensity and frequency. Quantifying these changes is key for developing adaptation strategies [1]. The conventional approach to study changes in hot extremes is based on air temperatures. However, hydrology [2] and many biogeochemical processes, e.g. decomposition of organic material and release of CO 2 [3]...
Foliar traits such as specific leaf area (SLA), leaf nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) concentrations play an important role in plant economic strategies and ecosystem functioning. Various global maps of these foliar traits have been generated using statistical upscaling approaches based on in-situ trait observations.Here, we intercompare such global...
We present a novel approach for modeling vegetation response to weather in Europe as measured by the Sentinel 2 satellite. Existing satellite imagery forecasting approaches focus on photorealistic quality of the multispectral images, while derived vegetation dynamics have not yet received as much attention. We leverage both spatial and temporal con...
The process of evapotranspiration transfers liquid water from vegetation and soil surfaces to the atmosphere, the so-called latent heat flux ( QLE ), and modulates the Earth’s energy, water, and carbon cycle. Vegetation controls QLE by regulating leaf stomata opening (surface resistance rs in the Big Leaf approach) and by altering surface roughness...
While the eddy covariance (EC) technique is a well-established method for measuring water fluxes (i.e., evaporation or 'evapotranspiration', ET), the measurement is susceptible to many uncertainties. One such issue is the potential underestimation of ET when relative humidity (RH) is high (>70%), due to low-pass filtering with some EC systems. Yet,...
Fundamental axes of variation in plant traits result from trade-offs between costs and benefits of resource-use strategies at the leaf scale. However, it is unclear whether trade-offs and optimality principles in functional traits of leaves are conserved at the ecosystem level. We tested three well-known leaf- and plant-level coordination theories...
The input of liquid water to terrestrial ecosystems is composed of rain and non-rainfall water (NRW). The latter comprises dew, fog, and the adsorption of atmospheric vapor on soil particle surfaces. Although NRW inputs can be relevant to support ecosystem functioning in seasonally dry ecosystems, they are understudied, being relatively small, and...
The ecosystem carbon turnover time—an emergent ecosystem property that partly determines the feedback between the terrestrial carbon cycle and climate—is strongly controlled by temperature. However, it remains uncertain to what extent hydrometeorological conditions may influence the apparent temperature sensitivity of τ, defined as the factor by wh...
Existing methods for fine-scale air quality assessment have significant gaps in their reliability. Purely data-driven methods lack any physically-based mechanisms to simulate the interactive process of air pollution, potentially leading to physically inconsistent or implausible results. Here, we report a hybrid multilevel graph neural network that...
One of the least understood temporal scales of global carbon cycle (C-cycle) dynamics is its interannual variability (IAV). This variability is mainly driven by variations in the local climatic drivers of terrestrial ecosystem activity, which in turn are controlled by large-scale modes of atmospheric variability. Here, we quantify the fraction of g...
Accurate subseasonal weather forecasts, from 2 weeks up to a season, can help reduce costs and impacts related to weather and corresponding extremes. The quality of weather forecasts has improved considerably in recent decades as models represent more details of physical processes, and they benefit from assimilating comprehensive Earth observation...
Elevated atmospheric CO2 (eCO2 ) influences the carbon assimilation rate and stomatal conductance of plants, thereby affecting the global cycles of carbon and water. Yet, the detection of these physiological effects of eCO2 in observational data remains challenging, because natural variations and confounding factors (e.g., warming) can overshadow t...
Droughts affect terrestrial ecosystems directly and concurrently and can additionally induce lagged effects in subsequent seasons and years. Such legacy effects of drought on vegetation growth and state have been widely studied in tree ring records and satellite-based vegetation greenness, while legacies on ecosystem carbon fluxes are still poorly...
Local studies and modeling experiments suggest that shallow groundwater and lateral redistribution of soil moisture, together with soil properties, can be highly important secondary water sources for vegetation in water-limited ecosystems. However, there is a lack of observation-based studies of these terrain-associated secondary water effects on v...
Terrestrial ecosystems respond to changes in environmental conditions, mainly via key climatic controls of precipitation and temperature on vegetation activities and decomposition processes (Taylor et al., 2017). Yet, the relationship between climate and the overall spatiotemporal dynamics and uncertainties of the global carbon cycle, i.e., gross p...
Terrestrial water storage (TWS) is an integrative hydrological state that is key for our understanding of the global water cycle. The TWS observation from GRACE missions has, therefore, been instrumental in calibration and validation of hydrological models and understanding the variations of the hydrological storages. The models, however, still sho...
Remote sensing capabilities to monitor evergreen broadleaved vegetation are limited by the low temporal variability in the greenness signal. With canopy greenness computed from digital repeat photography (PhenoCam), we investigated how canopy greenness related to seasonal changes in leaf age and traits as well as variation of trees’ water fluxes (c...
Anthropogenic nitrogen inputs cause major negative environmental impacts, including emissions of the important greenhouse gas N 2 O. Despite their importance, shifts in terrestrial N loss pathways driven by global change are highly uncertain. Here we present a coupled soil-atmosphere isotope model (IsoTONE) to quantify terrestrial N losses and N 2...
Global vegetation and associated ecosystem services critically depend on soil moisture availability which has decreased in many regions during the last three decades. While spatial patterns of vegetation sensitivity to global soil water have been recently investigated, long-term changes in vegetation sensitivity to soil water availability are still...
Terrestrial ecosystems are essential for food and water security and CO2 uptake. Ecosystem function is dependent on the availability of soil moisture, yet it is unclear how climate change will alter soil moisture limitation on vegetation. Here we use an ecosystem index that distinguishes energy and water limitations in Earth system model simulation...
Extreme events, such as those caused by climate change, economic or geopolitical shocks, and pest or disease epidemics, threaten global food security. The complexity of causation, as well as the myriad ways that an event, or a sequence of events, creates cascading and systemic impacts, poses significant challenges to food systems research and polic...
Long, high-quality time series measurements of atmospheric greenhouse gases show interannual variability in the measured seasonal cycles. These changes can be analyzed to better understand the carbon cycle and the impact of climate drivers. However, nearly all discrete measurement records contain gaps and have noise due to the influence of local fl...
Long, high-quality time series measurements of atmospheric greenhouse gases show interannual variability in the measured seasonal cycles. These changes can be analyzed to better understand the carbon cycle and the impact of climate drivers. However, nearly all discrete measurement records contain gaps and have noise due to the influence of local fl...
Tree-ring chronologies encode interannual variability in forest growth rates over long time periods from decades to centuries or even millennia. However, each chronology is a highly localized measurement describing conditions at specific sites where wood samples have been collected. The question whether these local growth variabilites are represent...
Droughts cause serious environmental and societal impacts, often aggravated by simultaneously occurring heat waves. Climate and vegetation play key roles in the evolution of drought-associated temperature anomalies, but their relative importance is largely unknown. Here, we present the hottest temperature anomalies during drought in subhumid and tr...
While the eddy covariance (EC) technique is a well-established method for measuring water fluxes (i.e., evaporation or 'evapotranspiration’, ET), the method is susceptible to many uncertainties. One such issue is the potential underestimation of ET when relative humidity (RH) is high (>70%), due to low-pass filtering with some EC systems. The influ...
Droughts affect terrestrial ecosystems directly and concurrently, and can additionally induce lagged effects in subsequent seasons and years. Such legacy effects of drought on vegetation growth and state have been widely studied in tree-ring records and satellite-based vegetation greenness, while legacies on ecosystem carbon fluxes are still poorly...
Process understanding and modeling is at the core of scientific reasoning. Principled parametric and mechanistic modeling dominated science and engineering until the recent emergence of machine learning. Despite great success in many areas, machine learning algorithms in the Earth and climate sciences, and more broadly in physical sciences, are not...
Whilst the last decades have seen a clear shift in emphasis from managing natural hazards to managing risk, the majority of natural-hazard risk research still focuses on single hazards. Internationally, there are calls for more attention for multi-hazards and multi-risks. Within the European Union (EU), the concepts of multi-hazard and multi-risk a...
Accurate subseasonal weather forecasts, from two weeks up to a season, can help reduce costs and impacts related to weather and corresponding extremes. The quality of weather forecasts has improved considerably in recent decades as models represent more details of physical processes, and they benefit from assimilating comprehensive Earth observatio...
One of the least understood temporal–scales of global carbon cycle (C–cycle) dynamics is its inter–annual variability (IAV). This variability is mainly driven by variations in the local climatic drivers of terrestrial ecosystem activity, which in turn are controlled by large–scale modes of atmospheric variability. Here, we quantify the fraction of...
Elevated atmospheric CO2 (eCO2) influences the carbon assimilation rate and stomatal conductance of plants, and thereby can affect the global cycles of carbon and water. However, the extent to which these physiological effects of eCO2 influence the land-atmosphere exchange of carbon and water is uncertain. In this study, we aim at developing a meth...
