Sensitivity of woody carbon stocks to bark investment strategy in Neotropical savannas and forests

Trugman, Anna T.; Medvigy, David; Hoffmann, William A.; Pellegrini, Adam F.  A.

doi:10.5194/bg-15-233-2018

Title: Sensitivity of woody carbon stocks to bark investment strategy in Neotropical savannas and forests

Journal Article · Thu Jan 11 00:00:00 EST 2018 · Biogeosciences (Online)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-15-233-2018· OSTI ID:1503246

^[1];

^[2]; Hoffmann, William A. ^[3]; Pellegrini, Adam F. A. ^[4]

Princeton Univ., NJ (United States); Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT (United States)
Univ. of Notre Dame, IN (United States)
North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC (United States)
Stanford Univ., CA (United States)

Fire frequencies are changing in Neotropical savannas andforests as a result of forest fragmentation and increasing drought. Suchchanges in fire regime and climate are hypothesized to destabilize tropicalcarbon storage, but there has been little consideration of the widespreadvariability in tree fire tolerance strategies. To test how abovegroundcarbon stocks change with fire frequency and composition of plants withdifferent fire tolerance strategies, we update the Ecosystem Demographymodel 2 (ED2) with (i) a fire survivorship module based on tree barkthickness (a key fire-tolerance trait across woody plants in savannas andforests), and (ii) plant functional types representative of trees in theregion. With these updates, the model is better able to predict how firefrequency affects population demography and aboveground woody carbon.Simulations illustrate that the high survival rate of thick-barked, largetrees reduces carbon losses with increasing fire frequency, with highinvestment in bark being particularly important in reducing losses in thewettest sites. Additionally, in landscapes that frequently burn, barkinvestment can broaden the range of climate and fire conditions under whichsavannas occur by reducing the range of conditions leading to eithercomplete tree loss or complete grass loss. These results highlight thattropical vegetation dynamics depend not only on rainfall and changing firefrequencies but also on tree fire survival strategy. Further, our resultsindicate that fire survival strategy is fundamentally important inregulating tree size demography in ecosystems exposed to fire, whichincreases the preservation of aboveground carbon stocks and the coexistenceof different plant functional groups.

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Research Organization:: Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)

Grant/Contract Number:: SC0014363

OSTI ID:: 1503246

Journal Information:: Biogeosciences (Online), Vol. 15, Issue 1; ISSN 1726-4189

Publisher:: European Geosciences UnionCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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Cited by: 7 works

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