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Atmospheric temperature and humidity demonstrated strong correlation with productivity in tropical moist deciduous forests

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Abstract

Tropical forests sequester six times higher carbon than that released by humans annually into the atmosphere. These biodiversity-rich tropical forests have high net primary productivity (NPP), which differs among constituent plant communities. Tropical moist deciduous forests occupy 179,335 km2 of India’s geographical area and constitute 44% of the country’s total protected area (PA) forests. The productivity of these forests has neither been estimated specifically nor precisely. We measured the annual NPP of three predominant distinct community types, viz., mixed (DM), sal (SM), and teak (TP), in a tropical moist deciduous forest in northern India. The NPP was estimated from tree biomass data collected from nine long-term ecological research (LTER) plots of 1 ha each representing the above three community types. The estimated annual NPP were 10.28, 6.25, and 9.79 Mg ha−1 year−1 in DM; 8.93, 7.09, and 10.59 Mg ha−1 year−1 in SM; and 14.57, 7.14, and 13.56 Mg ha−1 year−1 in TP for the years 2010, 2011, and 2012, respectively. The NPP was correlated with tree density, height and DBH, species richness, diversity, microclimatic and edaphic variables, and leaf area index (LAI) using principal component analysis (PCA) and generalized linear modeling (GLM). Air temperature and humidity were strongly related to NPP in all the community types, while “complementarity” and “selection effects” contributed to the NPP in both the sal and mixed forest communities with equal importance, and the NPP in teak plantation ould point to “dominance effect.”

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Data availability

I, Soumit K. Behera, on behalf of all the authors declare that we have given all the required data in the above manuscript. We do not have any additional data to give with the above MS. We will share the raw data if required.

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Acknowledgements

The director of CSIR-National Botanical Research Institute, Lucknow, India, is sincerely acknowledged for providing the necessary facilities. Dr. Nayan Sahu, Dr. Ashish K. Mishra, Dr. Omesh Bajpai, and Dr. Niraj Singh are also acknowledged for assisting in the field measurements. Thanks are also due to PCCF (Wildlife), Government of Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow, the Field director of Dudhwa National Park, Lakhimpur, and the divisional forest officer at Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary, Bahraich, for granting permission to carry out the field works and extending on-site support. The valuable suggestions given by both the anonymous reviewers and the editor are sincerely acknowledged.

Funding

The funds to carry out this work were received from CSIR, New Delhi, under NWP-020 and BSC-0109. We thank the institutional ethics committee for granting institutional MS no CSIR-NBRI_MS/2022/07/04.

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  1. Plant Ecology and Climate Change Science Division, CSIR-National Botanical Research Institute, Rana Pratap Marg, Lucknow, 226001, Uttar Pradesh, India

    Soumit Kumar Behera, Rakesh Tuli & Saroj K. Barik

  2. Centre for Oceans, Rivers, Atmosphere and Land Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India

    Soumit Kumar Behera & Mukunda Dev Behera

  3. UIET, Panjab University, Sector 25, Chandigarh, India

    Rakesh Tuli

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Soumit K. Behera planned the experiment, collected the field data for calculation of NPP, and measured the different eco-physiological parameters. Mukunda D. Behera and Rakesh Tuli supervised the PhD work of Soumit K. Behera and reviewed the manuscript. Saroj K. Barik performed the statistical data analysis and provided valuable suggestions and reviews for improving the contents of this paper. Soumit K. Behera prepared the first draft of the manuscript. All the authors contributed equally in revising the manuscript.

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Behera, S.K., Behera, M.D., Tuli, R. et al. Atmospheric temperature and humidity demonstrated strong correlation with productivity in tropical moist deciduous forests. Environ Monit Assess 195, 69 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-022-10668-7

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