Title
Mapping Temperate Vegetation Climate Adaptation Variability Using Normalized Land Surface Phenology
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-19-2016
Keywords
bioclimatology, plant phenology, spring index, climate change, phenological response, geographic adaptation
Description
Climate influences geographic differences of vegetation phenology through both contemporary and historical variability. The latter effect is embodied in vegetation heterogeneity underlain by spatially varied genotype and species compositions tied to climatic adaptation. Such long-term climatic effects are difficult to map and therefore often neglected in evaluating spatially explicit phenological responses to climate change. In this study we demonstrate a way to indirectly infer the portion of land surface phenology variation that is potentially contributed by underlying genotypic differences across space. The method undertaken normalized remotely sensed vegetation start-of-season (or greenup onset) with a cloned plants-based phenological model. As the geography of phenological model prediction (first leaf) represents the instantaneous effect of contemporary climate, the normalized land surface phenology potentially reveals vegetation heterogeneity that is related to climatic adaptation. The study was done at the continental scale for the conterminous U.S., with a focus on the eastern humid temperate domain. Our findings suggest that, in an analogous scenario, if a uniform contemporary climate existed everywhere, spring vegetation greenup would occur earlier in the north than in the south. This is in accordance with known species-level clinal variations—for many temperate plant species, populations adapted to colder climates require less thermal forcing to initiate growth than those in warmer climates. This study, for the first time, shows that such geographic adaption relationships are supported at the ecosystem level. Mapping large-scale vegetation climate adaptation patterns contributes to our ability to better track geographically varied phenological responses to climate change.
Publication Title
Climate
Volume
4
Issue
2
First Page
24
DOI of Published Version
10.3390/cli4020024
Editor(s)
Yang Zhang
Pages
12
Format
application/pdf
Language
en
Publisher
MDPI
Rights
© 2016 by the authors.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Liang, Liang; Schwartz, Mark D.; and Zhang, Xiaoyang, "Mapping Temperate Vegetation Climate Adaptation Variability Using Normalized Land Surface Phenology" (2016). GSCE Faculty Publications. 1.
https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/gsce_pubs/1
Comments
Supplemental material includes two figures formatted as PNG files