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Changes in water use efficiency and their relations to climate change and human activities in three forestry regions of China

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Abstract

Water use efficiency (WUE) is an important link between carbon and water cycles, which is critical for the forests under future global climatic changes. WUENDVI was calculated by accumulated normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and actual evapotranspiration (ET) and could reflect the impacts of climatic changes and human activities on WUE. The three forestry regions of China are the northeast, southwest, and southeast areas. Among them, the northeast forest region is a natural forest region with forest stock accounting for more than 1/4 of China, and the southwest mountainous forest region is another natural forest region in China, with forest stock accounting for more than 1/3 of China, while the southeast forest area is mainly plantations. In 2018, the forest areas over three forestry regions of China were around 1,725,988 km2. This paper evaluated the changes in forest WUE and their relationships with climatic change and human activities over three forestry regions of China during 1961–2019. The main findings of this study were summarized as follows: (1) the spatial changes of WUE were gentle in the artificial forest region but fluctuant sharply in the natural forest regions. In the southwest forest region, the WUE increased with elevation, while it showed the opposite trends in the artificial forest region. Overall, the annual mean forest WUE increased in almost all regions of the study areas during 1961-2019; (2) in the northeast and southeast forest regions, the WUE presented a negative relationship with the temperature. In the southwest forest region, the WUE was positively correlated with the temperature and its increase rate slowed down significantly when the temperature increases by more than 1 °C. The WUE was negatively correlated with precipitation in the three regions and was more sensitive to the decrease of precipitation. The sensitivity of WUE to precipitation reduction was highest in the artificial forest region and lowest in the northeast forest region; (3) the forest WUE and WUENDVI were lowest in the artificial forest region but highest in the northeast forest region, while the net increase in forests area during 1980–2018 was largest in the artificial forest region (155,975 km2) but lowest in the northeast forest region (78,766 km2). In general, human activities had the greatest impact on the forest WUE in the northeast forest region. Human activities and climatic change had quite complex and interactive effects on forest WUE. Therefore, more attention should be paid to the joint influences of climate change and human activities on WUE.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is financially supported by The National Key Research and Development Project of China (Grant NO. 2019YFC0409004) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant NO. 91747203 and 41971025). The project is supported by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD). We would like to thank the National Climate Centre in Beijing for providing valuable climate datasets.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Joint Innovation Center for Modern Forestry Studies, College of Biology and the Environment, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, 210037, Jiangsu, China

    Jiaxi Tian, Zengxin Zhang, Bin Zhu & Fengying Zhang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Hydrology-Water Resources and Hydraulics Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing, 210098, Jiangsu, China

    Zengxin Zhang & Rui Kong

  3. Institute of Surface-Earth System Science, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China

    Shanshan Jiang & Xi Chen

Authors
  1. Jiaxi Tian
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  2. Zengxin Zhang
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  3. Rui Kong
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  4. Bin Zhu
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  5. Fengying Zhang
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  6. Shanshan Jiang
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  7. Xi Chen
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Contributions

J.T. wrote and revised the original draft. Z.Z., R.K., and F.Z. provided the datasets including the required supporting geoinformation software needed for the analyses; B.Z. and X.C. cooperated in designing and improving the concept of the research project and related processes; J.T. and S.J. conducted the data processing and analysis. All the authors participated actively in preparing and reviewing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Zengxin Zhang.

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Tian, J., Zhang, Z., Kong, R. et al. Changes in water use efficiency and their relations to climate change and human activities in three forestry regions of China. Theor Appl Climatol 144, 1297–1310 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03600-5

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