Journal article
Productivity of an Australian mountain grassland is limited by temperature and dryness despite long growing seasons
Renee M Marchin, Ian McHugh, Robert R Simpson, Lachlan J Ingram, Damian S Balas, Bradley J Evans, Mark A Adams
AGRICULTURAL AND FOREST METEOROLOGY | ELSEVIER | Published : 2018
Abstract
Changing climates have extended growing seasons and increased vegetation productivity in many northern ecosystems, but less is known about Southern Hemisphere counterparts. Among the more dramatic changes are reductions in winter snow cover in mountainous ecosystems in southeastern Australia; some forecasts predict almost complete absence of snow by 2050. We used the eddy covariance technique in a montane grassland (Nimmo) of the Snowy Mountains, which was a carbon sink of 26−185 g C m−2 yr−1 from 2007–2014 but was temperature- and moisture-limited. Higher soil temperatures increased net productivity at a rate of about 2.2 g C m−2 month−1 per 1 °C, when soil water content was not limiting. C..
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Funding Acknowledgements
The Nimmo site and flux station was established by funding from the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre. Maintenance of the Nimmo flux station was supported by funding from OzFlux and the overarching Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), which is supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). The MOD13Q1 was retrieved from the TERN-AusCover Data Portal (http://www.auscover.org.au/), courtesy of the NASA EOSDIS Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC), USGS/Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, Sioux Falls, South Dakota (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov). We thank Peter Isaac, Lutz Merbold, Matthias Haeni, and Lukas Hortnagl for their help with processing of eddy covariance data. We also thank Andrew Richardson for providing us with data from the PhenoCam dataset V1.0 (as well as individual site acknowledgments which are noted in Table S2) and Ian Marang for providing the ANUClimate dataset. Thanks to Coolringdon Pastoral Company and Jim Treasure for access to the Nimmo site.