Ecosystem

A Roadmap for High-Resolution Satellite Soil Moisture Applications – Confronting Product Characteristics with User Requirements

Soil moisture observations are of broad scientific interest and practical value for a wide range of applications. The scientific community has made significant progress in estimating soil moisture from satellite-based Earth observation data, …

Ecosystem Functioning Is Enveloped by Hydrometeorological Variability

Terrestrial ecosystem processes, and the associated vegetation carbon dynamics, respond differently to hydrometeorological variability across timescales, and so does our scientific understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Long-term variability of …

Observing ecosystems with lightweight, rapid-scanning terrestrial lidar scanners

A new wave of terrestrial lidar scanners, optimized for rapid scanning and portability, such as the Compact Biomass Lidar (CBL), enable and improve observations of structure across a range of important ecosystems. We performed studies with the CBL in …

Diagnosing the Dynamics of Observed and Simulated Ecosystem Gross Primary Productivity with Time Causal Information Theory Quantifiers

Data analysis and model-data comparisons in the environmental sciences require diagnostic measures that quantify time series dynamics and structure, and are robust to noise in observational data. This paper investigates the temporal dynamics of …

Ecology: Ecosystem Responses to Climate Extremes

Extreme drought or wet conditions have now been found to strongly influence the vegetative development of ecosystems. Semi-arid regions are most affected - raising concerns about their vulnerability to long-term drought in the future. © 2015 …

Effects of Climate Extremes on the Terrestrial Carbon Cycle: Concepts, Processes and Potential Future Impacts

Extreme droughts, heat waves, frosts, precipitation, wind storms and other climate extremes may impact the structure, composition and functioning of terrestrial ecosystems, and thus carbon cycling and its feedbacks to the climate system. Yet, the …

Influence of Physiological Phenology on the Seasonal Pattern of Ecosystem Respiration in Deciduous Forests

Understanding the environmental and biotic drivers of respiration at the ecosystem level is a prerequisite to further improve scenarios of the global carbon cycle. In this study we investigated the relevance of physiological phenology, defined as …

Linking Plant and Ecosystem Functional Biogeography

Classical biogeographical observations suggest that ecosystems are strongly shaped by climatic constraints in terms of their structure and function. On the other hand, vegetation function feeds back on the climate system via biosphere-atmosphere …

Response to Comment on "Global Convergence in the Temperature Sensitivity of Respiration at Ecosystem Level"

We estimated the sensitivity of terrestrial ecosystem respiration to air temperature across 60 FLUXNET sites by minimizing the effect of seasonally confounding factors. Graf et al. now offer a theoretical perspective for an extension of our …

Global Convergence in the Temperature Sensitivity of Respiration at Ecosystem Level

The respiratory release of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the land surface is a major flux in the global carbon cycle, antipodal to photosynthetic CO2 uptake. Understanding the sensitivity of respiratory processes to temperature is central for quantifying …