Declining precipitation frequency may drive earlier leaf senescence by intensifying drought stress and enhancing drought acclimation
Precipitation is an important factor influencing the date of foliar senescence, which in turn affects carbon uptake of terrestrial ecosystems. However, the temporal patterns of precipitation frequency and its impact on foliar senescence date remain largely unknown. Using both long-term carbon flux d...
| Autores: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
|---|---|
| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2025 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ddd.uab.cat:307767 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://ddd.uab.cat/record/307767 https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.1038/s41467-025-56159-4 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Climate-change impacts Climate and Earth system modelling Phenology Ecological modelling |
| Sumario: | Precipitation is an important factor influencing the date of foliar senescence, which in turn affects carbon uptake of terrestrial ecosystems. However, the temporal patterns of precipitation frequency and its impact on foliar senescence date remain largely unknown. Using both long-term carbon flux data and satellite observations across the Northern Hemisphere, we show that, after excluding impacts from of temperature, radiation and total precipitation by partial correlation analysis, declining precipitation frequency may drive earlier foliar senescence date from 1982 to 2022. A decrease in precipitation frequency intensifies drought stress by reducing root-zone soil moisture and increasing atmospheric dryness, and limit the photosynthesis necessary for sustained growth. The enhanced drought acclimation, showing a more rapid response to drought, also explains the positive relationship between precipitation frequency and foliar senescence date. Finally, we find 30 current state-of-art Earth system models largely fail to capture the sensitivity of DFS to changes in precipitation frequency and incorrectly predict the direction of correlations for approximately half of the northern global lands, in both historical simulations and future predictions. Our results therefore highlight the critical need to include precipitation frequency, rather than just total precipitation, into models to accurately forecast plant phenology under future climate change. Precipitation impacts leaf senescence. Here, the authors use carbon flux and satellite data to demonstrate that reduced precipitation frequency is associated with a faster drought response in trees and show that Earth system models don't capture the impact of reduced precipitation. |
|---|