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Early-spring soil warming partially offsets the enhancement of alpine grassland aboveground productivity induced by warmer growing seasons on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

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Abstract

Aims

The response of vegetation productivity to global warming is becoming a worldwide concern. While most reports on responses to warming trends are based on measured increases in air temperature, few studies have evaluated long-term variation in soil temperature and its impacts on vegetation productivity. Such impacts are especially important for high-latitude or high-altitude regions, where low temperature is recognized as the most critical limitation for plant growth.

Methods

We used Partial Least Squares regression to correlate long-term aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) data of an alpine grassland on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau with daily air and soil temperatures during 1997–2011. We also analyzed temporal trends for air temperature and soil temperature at different depths.

Results

Soil temperatures have steadily increased at a rate of 0.4–0.9 °C per decade, whereas air temperatures showed no significant trend between 1997 and 2011. While temperature increases during the growing season (May–August) promoted aboveground productivity, warming before the growing season (March–April) had a negative effect on productivity. The negative effect was amplified in the soil layers, especially at 15 cm depth, where variation in aboveground productivity was dominated by early-spring soil warming, rather than by increasing temperature during the growing season.

Conclusions

Future warming, especially in winter and spring, may further reduce soil water availability in early spring, which may slow down or even reverse the increases in grassland aboveground productivity that have widely been reported on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the staff at the Haibei Grassland Ecological Monitoring Station on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau for collecting grassland aboveground productivity, weather and soil temperature data since 1997. This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41701606 & 41701292), the National Key Research Program of China (2016YFC0500700), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2016 M590974 & 2017M610647), the Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province (2017JQ3015 & 2017JQ3041), the West Light Foundation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (K318021507), and the program from Northwest A&F University (2452016108). Further support was supplied by the Key Cultivation Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (3102016QD078). We also thank the field editor from Plant and Soil and four anonymous reviewers who provided constructive and thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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Author notes

  1. Liang Guo and Ji Chen Joint first authors. These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, 712100, China

    Liang Guo, Jimin Cheng, Zhongming Wen & Changhui Peng

  2. Center for Ecological and Environmental Sciences, Key Laboratory for Space Bioscience & Biotechnology, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, China

    Ji Chen

  3. State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an, 710061, China

    Ji Chen

  4. University of Bonn, 53121, Bonn, Germany

    Eike Luedeling

  5. World Agroforestry Center, Nairobi, 00100, Kenya

    Eike Luedeling

  6. Department of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Jin-Sheng He

  7. Key Laboratory of Adaptation and Evolution of Plateau Biota, Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xining, 810008, China

    Jin-Sheng He

  8. Department of Biology Science, Institute of Environment Sciences, University of Quebec at Montreal, Montreal, H3C 3P8, Canada

    Changhui Peng

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  1. Liang Guo
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Correspondence to Changhui Peng.

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Guo, L., Chen, J., Luedeling, E. et al. Early-spring soil warming partially offsets the enhancement of alpine grassland aboveground productivity induced by warmer growing seasons on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. Plant Soil 425, 177–188 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-018-3582-0

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