Hydrological niche separation explains seasonal and inter-annual variations of vegetation dynamics in seasonally dry tropical forests

Abstract:

Despite ample water supply, vegetation dynamics are subject to seasonal water stress in large fraction of tropical forests. These seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTFs) account for over 40% of tropical forests, harbor high biodiversity, have large potential carbon sink due to forest recovery from human disturbance and also play a critical role in global carbon budget and inter-annual variations. Plants in this biome display notably diverse responses to seasonal and inter-annual variations of water availability, especially inter-specific variations in canopy seasonality and biomass growth. Current process-based dynamic vegetation models cannot represent these diversities and are shown to perform poorly on simulating drought responses of tropical forests, calling into question of their ability to accurately simulate future changes in SDTFs. Accumulated field observations, suggest that hydrological niche separation driven by coordinated plant functional traits is associated with plants’ performance under drought. Yet, it remains not clear whether the physiology-level hydrological niche separation can explain the ecosystem-level diversity observed in SDTFs. Here, we test the theory with a model-data fusion approach. We implemented a new plant hydrodynamic module that is able to track leaf water potential at sub-daily scale in ED2 model. We further incorporated a hydrological niche separation scheme based on a meta-data analysis of key functional traits in SDTFs. Simulated ecological patterns with and without hydrological niche separation were then compared with remote-sensing and long-term field observations from an SDTF site in Palo Verde, Costa Rica. Using several numerical experiments, we specifically examine the following questions: (i) Whether hydrological niche separation can explain the diversity in canopy seasonality and biomass growth? (ii) How important are the yet uncertain belowground functional traits, especially root profile in determining canopy seasonality? (iii) Whether the new hydrological niche separation scheme also works in different precipitation regimes? And (iv) how important is functional diversity in plants’ responses to water stress in predicting vegetation dynamics in SDTFs.