A paper published on water use efficiency in Asian permafrost region

A paper led by Fenghui Yuan is published in Science of the Total Environment. Congratulations!!

Permafrost plays an important role in regulating global climate system. We analyzed the gross primary productivity (GPP), net primary productivity (NPP), and evapotranspiration (ET) derived from MODIS and three earth system models participated in the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) in the Asian permafrost region. The water use efficiency (WUE) was further computed. The simulated GPP, NPP, and ET show slightly increasing trends during historical period (1900–2014) and strong increasing trends in projection period (2015–2100), and projected impacts of climate change on all variables are greater under high-emission scenarios than low-emission scenarios. Further analysis revealed higher increases in GPP and NPP than that of ET, indicating that vegetation carbon sequestration governs the growing WUE under historical and projected periods in this region. The GPP, NPP and ET showed higher changing rates in western, central and southeast areas of this region, and WUE (WUEGPP, and WUENPP) shows the similar spatial pattern. Compared to MODIS-derived GPP, NPP, and ET during 2000–2014, Earth system models yield the best estimates for NPP, while slight underestimations for GPP and ET, and thus slight overestimations for WUEGPP and WUENPP. This study highlights the predominant role of vegetation activity in regulating regional WUE in Asian permafrost region under future climate change. Vegetation domination of the growing water use efficiency implies that the permafrost region may continue acting efficiently in sequestrating atmospheric carbon in terms of water consumption throughout the 21st century.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720331041

 
 
 

About the author

My research mainly focuses on land-atmosphere interaction in a framework of Earth system modeling. I am currently working on evaluating soil microbial mechanisms on production and consumption of trace gases and their roles in climate system dynamics. I have published numerous papers in prestigious journals including Ecology Letters, Global Change Biology, Global Biogeochemical Cycle, Global Ecology and Biogeography, Environmental Science and Technology, Biogeosciences, Journal of Geophysical Research, and Environmental Research Letter, etc. I also serve as an associate editor for Global Ecology and Biogeography and on editorial board for Agricultural and Forestry Meteorology and as an expert review for the 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wetland supplement as well as an ad hoc reviewer for more than twenty international journals and a few funding agencies.

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