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Limited driving of elevated CO2 on vegetation greening over global drylands

Jian, Dongnan; Niu, Guo-Yue; Ma, Zhuguo; Liu, Hongyan; Guan, Dabo; Zhou, Xin; Zhou, Juan; (2023) Limited driving of elevated CO2 on vegetation greening over global drylands. Environmental Research Letters , 18 (10) , Article 104024. 10.1088/1748-9326/acf6d3. Green open access

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Abstract

Drylands are the world's largest biome and dominate the trends and interannual variability of global carbon sinks. Although a 'greening' trend of global drylands has been widely reported, large uncertainties remain in attributing its drivers. It is increasingly emphasized that elevated CO2 has greatly contributed to the vegetation greening over global drylands. Here we quantified the contributions of climate change, elevated CO2, and land use and land cover change (LULCC) on leaf area index (LAI) over drylands, using a process-based land surface model Noah-MP to investigate the drivers of vegetation change. The state-of-the-art model shows better performance in simulating the interannual variability of satellite-observed LAI over global drylands compared with that of the multi-model ensemble mean LAI from the TRENDY results. The area that LAI changes dominated by climate change (44.03%) is three times greater than that by CO2 (13.89%), and climate change also contributes most to the global drylands greening trend (55.07%). LULCC shows regional dominance over 13.35% of the global drylands, which is associated with afforestation, woody plant encroachment, and agricultural intensification. Our results imply that the vegetation greening area driven by elevated CO2 is much limited relative to the overwhelming climatic driving, which should be considered in predictions of trends and interannual variations of global carbon sinks.

Type: Article
Title: Limited driving of elevated CO2 on vegetation greening over global drylands
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/acf6d3
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/acf6d3
Language: English
Additional information: Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Keywords: Vegetation change, climate change, elevated CO2, Noah-MP land surface model, drylands
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10179746
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