Tree crown damage and its effects on forest carbon cycling in a tropical forest
Needham, Jessica F.; Arellano, Gabriel; Davies, Stuart J.; Fisher, Rosie A.; Hammer, Valerie; Knox, Ryan G.; Mitre, David; Muller-Landau, Helene C.; Zuleta, Daniel; Koven, Charlie D.
2022-09
Citation
Needham, Jessica F.; Arellano, Gabriel; Davies, Stuart J.; Fisher, Rosie A.; Hammer, Valerie; Knox, Ryan G.; Mitre, David; Muller-Landau, Helene C. ; Zuleta, Daniel; Koven, Charlie D. (2022). "Tree crown damage and its effects on forest carbon cycling in a tropical forest." Global Change Biology (18): 5560-5574.
Abstract
Crown damage can account for over 23% of canopy biomass turnover in tropical forests and is a strong predictor of tree mortality; yet, it is not typically represented in vegetation models. We incorporate crown damage into the Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator (FATES), to evaluate how lags between damage and tree recovery or death alter demographic rates and patterns of carbon turnover. We represent crown damage as a reduction in a tree’s crown area and leaf and branch biomass, and allow associated variation in the ratio of aboveground to belowground plant tissue. We compare simulations with crown damage to simulations with equivalent instant increases in mortality and benchmark results against data from Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama. In FATES, crown damage causes decreases in growth rates that match observations from BCI. Crown damage leads to increases in carbon starvation mortality in FATES, but only in configurations with high root respiration and decreases in carbon storage following damage. Crown damage also alters competitive dynamics, as plant functional types that can recover from crown damage outcompete those that cannot. This is a first exploration of the trade- off between the additional complexity of the novel crown damage module and improved predictive capabilities. At BCI, a tropical forest that does not experience high levels of disturbance, both the crown damage simulations and simulations with equivalent increases in mortality does a reasonable job of capturing observations. The crown damage module provides functionality for exploring dynamics in forests with more extreme disturbances such as cyclones and for capturing the synergistic effects of disturbances that overlap in space and time.Crown damage is a strong predictor of tree mortality and an important component of the carbon cycle. We introduced crown damage into the Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator (FATES) and benchmarked simulations against data from Barro Colorado Island (a) photo credit Pablo Narváez. In FATES, damaged trees lose crown biomass and crown area (b). The main ecosystem impacts of crown damage were due to increases in mortality, although damage itself led to changes in stand structure and decreases in aboveground biomass. Plants that allocate carbon to regrowing their crowns outcompeted those that allocate carbon to diameter growth (c).Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
ISSN
1354-1013 1365-2486
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