Response of Ecosystem Carbon–Water Fluxes to Extreme Drought in West Asia

Author:

Alsafadi Karam1ORCID,Bashir Bashar2ORCID,Mohammed Safwan34ORCID,Abdo Hazem Ghassan5ORCID,Mokhtar Ali67,Alsalman Abdullah2,Cao Wenzhi1ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Education for Coastal and Wetland Ecosystems, College of Environment and Ecology, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361102, China

2. Department of Civil Engineering, College of Engineering, King Saud University, P.O. Box 800, Riyadh 11421, Saudi Arabia

3. Institute of Land Use, Technical and Precision Technology, Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences and Environmental Management, University of Debrecen, Böszörményi 138, 4032 Debrecen, Hungary

4. Institutes for Agricultural Research and Educational Farm, University of Debrecen, Böszörményi 138, 4032 Debrecen, Hungary

5. Geography Department, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Tartous University, Tartous P.O. Box 2147, Syria

6. Department of Agricultural Engineering, Faculty of Agriculture, Cairo University, Giza 12613, Egypt

7. School of Geographic Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China

Abstract

Global warming has resulted in increases in the intensity, frequency, and duration of drought in most land areas at the regional and global scales. Nevertheless, comprehensive understanding of how water use efficiency (WUE), gross primary production (GPP), and actual evapotranspiration (AET)-induced water losses respond to exceptional drought and whether the responses are influenced by drought severity (DS) is still limited. Herein, we assess the fluctuation in the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) over the Middle East from 1982 to 2017 to detect the drought events and further examine standardized anomalies of GPP, WUE, and AET responses to multiyear exceptional droughts, which are separated into five groups designed to characterize the severity of extreme drought. The intensification of the five drought events (based on its DS) increased the WUE, decreased the GPP and AET from D5 to D1, where both the positive and negative variance among the DS group was statistically significant. The results showed that the positive values of standardized WUE with the corresponding values of the negative GPP and AET were dominant (44.3% of the study area), where the AET values decreased more than the GPP, and the WUE fluctuation in this region is mostly controlled by physical processes, i.e., evaporation. Drought’s consequences on ecosystem carbon-water interactions ranged significantly among eco-system types due to the unique hydrothermal conditions of each biome. Our study indicates that forthcoming droughts, along with heightened climate variability, pose increased risks to semi-arid and sub-humid ecosystems, potentially leading to biome restructuring, starting with low-productivity, water-sensitive grasslands. Our assessment of WUE enhances understanding of water-carbon cycle linkages and aids in projecting ecosystem responses to climate change.

Funder

King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Publisher

MDPI AG

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