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Differential response of Qilian juniper radial growth to climate variations in the middle of Qilian Mountains and the northeastern Qaidam Basin

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Abstract

Tree growth in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere reveals significant inter-annual variation in carbon sequestration, and the variations have been widely attributed to climate change, especially to the recent rapid warming and increasing drought stress. However, the response of natural trees under the different regions that exist in the northeastern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau remains unclear. Here, we use nine Qilian juniper (Sabina przewalskii) tree-ring width and basal area increment (BAI) chronologies from the middle of the Qilian Mountains and the northeastern Qaidam Basin to quantify tree growth trends and their response to the recent rapid warming. The trees, growing at high and low elevations, exhibited a consistent pattern of inter-annual variations, with increasing synchronicity in their trends since 1950. Responses to several climate factors indicate that increasing temperature accelerated tree growth in the middle of the Qilian Mountains, but restricted tree growth in the northeastern Qaidam Basin. Moving-window correlation analyses demonstrate a clearly contrasting response to the temperature variations. Our findings suggest that growth of Qilian juniper in the middle of the Qilian Mountains will increase steadily in the future rapid warming, but may remain constant or even decrease in the northeastern Qaidam Basin. These contrasting responses to temperatures provide valuable information on forest dynamics in the critical mid-latitude regions that should be incorporated into predictions of future forest carbon cycling under global warming.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41171167), by the Major State Basic Research Development Program of China (973 Program) (2013CBA01808), and by the self-determination project of the State Key Laboratory of Cryospheric Sciences (SKLCS-ZZ-2015-01-12). We gratefully acknowledge the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Cryospheric Sciences Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 320 Donggang West Road, Lanzhou, 730000, China

    Wenzhi Wang, Xiaohong Liu, Dahe Qin, Guobao Xu, Bo Wang, Xiaomin Zeng, Guoju Wu & Xuanwen Zhang

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Wenzhi Wang, Guobao Xu, Bo Wang, Xiaomin Zeng, Guoju Wu & Xuanwen Zhang

  3. Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Xuemei Shao

Authors
  1. Wenzhi Wang
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  2. Xiaohong Liu
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  3. Xuemei Shao
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  4. Dahe Qin
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  5. Guobao Xu
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  6. Bo Wang
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  7. Xiaomin Zeng
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  8. Guoju Wu
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  9. Xuanwen Zhang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xiaohong Liu.

Electronic supplementary material

Tree-ring measurement and raw regional ring width chronology data can be found in the online version and the World Data Center for Palaeoclimatology (www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/).

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Wang, W., Liu, X., Shao, X. et al. Differential response of Qilian juniper radial growth to climate variations in the middle of Qilian Mountains and the northeastern Qaidam Basin. Climatic Change 133, 237–251 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1467-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1467-2

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