Climate change impacts on a pine stand in Central Siberia

Regional Environmental Change volume 16, pages 1671–1683 (2016)Cite this article

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to analyse the impacts of climate change on a pine forest stand in Central Siberia (Zotino) to assess benefits and risks for such forests in the future. We use the regional statistical climate model STARS to develop a set of climate change scenarios assuming a temperature increase by mid-century of 1, 2, 3 and 4 K. The process-based forest growth model 4C is applied to a 200-year-old pine forest to analyse impacts on carbon and water balance as well as the risk of fire under these climate change scenarios. The climate scenarios indicate precipitation increases mainly during winter and decreases during summer with increasing temperature trend. They cause rising forest productivity up to about 20 % in spite of increasing respiration losses. At the same time, the water-use efficiency increases slightly from 2.0 g C l−1 H2O under current climate to 2.1 g C l−1 H2O under 4 K scenario indicating that higher water losses from increasing evapotranspiration do not appear to lead to water limitations for the productivity at this site. The simulated actual evaporation increases by up to 32 %, but the climatic water balance decreases by up to 20 % with increasing temperature trend. In contrast, the risk of fire indicated by the Nesterov index clearly increases. Our analysis confirms increasing productivity of the boreal pine stand but also highlights increasing drought stress and risks from abiotic disturbances which could cancel out productivity gains.

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Acknowledgments

This study was based on data available in the European Fluxes Database Cluster (http://gaia.agraria.unitus.it/home) for the Zotino site. We are grateful to the responsible community for allowing the use of these data. Collection of these data was funded by TCOS Siberia (EU-FP5).

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  1. Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impact Research, P.O. Box 60 12 03, 14412, Potsdam, Germany

    Felicitas Suckow, Petra Lasch-Born, Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengarbe, Peter C. Werner & Christopher P. O. Reyer

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  1. Felicitas Suckow
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  2. Petra Lasch-Born
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  3. Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengarbe
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  4. Peter C. Werner
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Correspondence to Felicitas Suckow.

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Editor: James D. Ford.

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Suckow, F., Lasch-Born, P., Gerstengarbe, FW. et al. Climate change impacts on a pine stand in Central Siberia. Reg Environ Change 16, 1671–1683 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-015-0915-x

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Keywords

  • Climate scenarios
  • STARS
  • 4C
  • Forest productivity
  • Forest risks