Water availability limits tree productivity, carbon stocks, and carbon residence time in mature forests across the western US

Abstract. Water availability constrains the structure and function of terrestrial ecosystems and is projected to change in many parts of the world over the coming century. We quantified the response of tree net primary productivity (NPP), live biomass (BIO), and mean carbon residence time (CRT = BIO / NPP) to spatial variation in water availability in the western US. We used forest inventory measurements from 1953 mature stands (> 100 years) in Washington, Oregon, and California (WAORCA) along with satellite and climate data sets covering the western US. We summarized forest structure and function in both domains along a 400 cm yr−1 hydrologic gradient, quantified with a climate moisture index (CMI) based on the difference between precipitation and reference evapotranspiration summed over the water year (October–September) and then averaged annually from 1985 to 2014 (CMI wy ). Median NPP, BIO, and CRT computed at 10 cm yr−1 intervals along the CMI wy gradient increased monotonically with increasing CMI wy across both WAORCA (rs = 0.93–0.96, p

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  Biogeosciences

• Publication date

  2016-10-05

• Fields of study

  Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.5194/BG-14-365-2017
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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