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The global terrestrial carbon sink offsets one-third of the world’s fossil fuel emissions, but the strength of this sink is highly sensitive to large-scale extreme events. In 2012, the contiguous United States experienced exceptionally warm temperatures and the most severe drought since the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, resulting in substantial economic damage. It is crucial to understand the dynamics of such events because warmer temperatures and a higher prevalence of drought are projected in a changing climate. Here, we combine an extensive network of direct ecosystem flux measurements with satellite remote sensing and atmospheric inverse modeling to quantify the impact of the warmer spring and summer drought on biosphere-atmosphere carbon and water exchange in 2012.We consistently find that earlier vegetation activity increased spring carbon uptake and compensated for the reduced uptake during the summer drought, which mitigated the impact on net annual carbon uptake. The early phenological development in the Eastern Temperate Forests played a major role for the continental-scale carbon balance in 2012. The warm spring also depleted soil water resources earlier, and thus exacerbated water limitations during summer. Our results show that the detrimental effects of severe summer drought on ecosystem carbon storage can be mitigated by warming-induced increases in spring carbon uptake. However, the results also suggest that the positive carbon cycle effect of warm spring enhances water limitations and can increase summer heating through biosphere–atmosphere feedbacks.

As terrestrial leaf litter decomposes in rivers, its constituent elements follow multiple pathways. Carbon leached as dissolved organic matter can be quickly taken up by microbes, then respired before it can be transferred to the macroscopic food web. Alternatively, this detrital carbon can be ingested and assimilated by aquatic invertebrates, so it is retained longer in the stream and transferred to higher trophic levels. Microbial growth on litter can affect invertebrates through three pathways, which are not mutually exclusive. First, microbes can facilitate invertebrate feeding, improving food quality by conditioning leaves and making them more palatable for invertebrates. Second, microbes can be prey for invertebrates. Third, microbes can compete with invertebrates for resources bound within litter and may produce compounds that retard carbon and nitrogen fluxes to invertebrates. As litter is broken down into smaller particles, there are many opportunities for its elements to reenter the stream food web. Here, I describe a conceptual framework for evaluating how traits of leaf litter will affect its fate in food webs and ecosystems that is useful for predicting how global change will alter carbon fluxes into and out of streams.

Plants mediate water fluxes within the soil–vegetation–atmosphere continuum. This water transfer in soils, through plants, into the atmosphere can be effectively traced by stable isotopologues of water. However, rapid dynamic processes have only recently gained attention, such as adaptations in root water uptake depths (within hours to days) or the imprint of transpirational fluxes on atmospheric moisture, particularly promoted by the development of real-time in-situ water vapour stable isotope observation techniques. We focus on open questions and emerging insights at the soil–plant and plant–atmosphere interfaces, aswebelieve that these are the controlling factors for ecosystem water cycling. At both interfaces, complex pictures of interacting ecophysiological and hydrological processes emerge: root water uptake dynamics depend on both spatiotemporal variations in water availability and species-specific regulation of adaptive root conductivity within the rooting system by, for example, modulating soil–root conductivity in response to water and nutrient demands. Similarly, plant water transport and losses are a fine-tuned interplay between species-specific structural and functional strategies of water use and atmospheric processes. We propose that only by explicitly merging insights from distinct disciplines – for example, hydrology, plant physiology and atmospheric sciences – will we gain a holistic picture of the impact of vegetation on processes governing the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum.

Quantifying impacts of ecological disturbance on ecosystem carbon and water fluxes will improve predictive understanding of biosphere-atmosphere feedbacks. Tree mortality caused by mountain pine bark beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae) is hypothesized to decrease photosynthesis and water flux to the atmosphere while increasing respiration at a rate proportional to mortality. This work uses data from an eddy-covariance flux tower in a bark beetle infested lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) forest to test ecosystem responses during the outbreak. Analyses were conducted on components of carbon (C) and water fluxes in response to disturbance and environmental factors (solar radiation, soil water content and vapor pressure deficit). Maximum CO2 uptake did not change as tree basal area mortality increased from 30 to 78% over three years of beetle disturbance. Growing season evapotranspiration varied among years while ecosystem water use efficiency (the ratio of net CO2 uptake to water vapor loss) did not change. Between 2009 and 2011, canopy water conductance increased from 98.6 to 151.7 mmol H2O m−2 s−1. Ecosystem light use efficiency of photosynthesis increased, with quantum yield increasing by 16% during the outbreak as light increased below the mature tree canopy and illuminated remaining vegetation more. Overall net ecosystem productivity was correlated with water flux and hence water availability. Average weekly ecosystem respiration, derived from light response curves and standard Ameriflux protocols for CO2 flux partitioning into respiration and gross ecosystem productivity, did not change as mortality increased. Separate effects of increased respiration and photosynthesis efficiency largely canceled one another out, presumably due to increased diffuse light in the canopy and soil organic matter decomposition resulting in no change in net CO2 exchange. These results agree with an emerging consensus in the literature demonstrating CO2 and H2O dynamics following large scale disturbance events are dependent not only on tree mortality but also on the remaining and new vegetation responses because mortality and recovery occur at the same time.

Despite the importance of future carbon (C) pools for policy and land management decisions under various climate change scenarios, predictions of these pools under altered climate vary considerably. Chronic warming will likely impact both ecosystem C fluxes and the abundance and distribution of plant functional types (PFTs) within systems, potentially interacting to create novel patterns of C exchange. Here, we report results from a 3-year warming experiment using open top chambers (OTC) on the Tibetan Plateau meadow grassland. Warming significantly increased C uptake through gross primary productivity (GPP) but not ecosystem respiration (ER), resulting in a 31.0% reduction in net ecosystem exchange (NEE) in warmed plots. The OTC-induced changes in ecosystem C fluxes were not fully explained by the corresponding changes in soil temperature and moisture. Warming treatments significantly increased the biomass of graminoids and legumes by 12.9 and 27.6%. These functional shifts were correlated with enhanced local GPP, but not ER, resulting in more negative NEE in plots with larger increases in graminoid and legume biomass. This may be due to a link between greater legume abundance and higher levels of total inorganic nitrogen, which can potentially drive higher GPP, but not higher ER. Overall, our results indicate that C-climate feedbacks might be closely mediated by climate-induced changes in PFTs. This highlights the need to consider the impacts of changes in PFTs when predicting future responses of C pools under altered climate scenarios.

Characterizing the spatial variation in the CO₂ flux at both large and small scales is essential for precise estimation of an ecosystem's CO₂ sink strength. However, little is known about small-scale CO₂ flux variations in an ecosystem. We explored these variations in a Kobresia meadow ecosystem on the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau in relation to spatial variability in species composition and biomass. We established 14 points and measured net ecosystem production (NEP), gross primary production (GPP), and ecosystem respiration (Re) in relation to vegetation biomass, species richness, and environmental variables at each point, using an automated chamber system during the 2005 growing season. Mean light-saturated NEP and GPP were 30.3 and 40.5 μmol CO₂ m⁻² s⁻¹ [coefficient of variation (CV), 42.7 and 29.4], respectively. Mean Re at 20°C soil temperature, Re₂₀, was −10.9 μmol CO₂ m⁻² s⁻¹ (CV, 27.3). Re₂₀ was positively correlated with vegetation biomass. GPPmax was positively correlated with species richness, but 2 of the 14 points were outliers. Vegetation biomass was the main determinant of spatial variation of Re, whereas species richness mainly affected that of GPP, probably reflecting the complexity of canopy structure and light partitioning in this small grassland patch.

Measuring ecosystem gas fluxes is crucial to understanding the dynamics of ecosystem water and energy cycling. A common method to measure ecosystem gas fluxes (CO2, CH4, N2O) and to compare experimental treatments is the use of closed‐loop chambers. However, the output data require extensive processing before analysis, making the workflow prone to bias and limiting comparability between studies. While there are various methods to process flux data, they lack reproducibility and automation. The fluxible R package provides a reproducible way to process raw gas concentration data from closed‐loop chambers into an analysis‐ready dataset of ecosystem gas fluxes. The processing steps include (1) separating the measurements, (2) fitting a linear, quadratic, or exponential model, (3) assessing the quality of the fit, (4) plotting the fluxes for visual inspection and (5) calculating the fluxes. In addition to reproducibility, fluxible focuses on homogeneity and automation in data processing, thus reducing the time investment for users while improving comparability across studies.

Stable isotopes are valuable tools for partitioning the components contributing to ecological processes of interest, such as animal diets and trophic interactions, plant resource use, ecosystem gas fluxes, streamflow, and many more. Stable isotope data are often analyzed with simple linear mixing (SLM) models to partition the contributions of different sources, but SLM models cannot incorporate a mechanistic understanding of the underlying processes and do not accommodate additional data associated with these processes (e.g., environmental covariates, flux data, gut contents). Thus, SLM models lack predictive ability. We describe a process-based mixing (PBM) model approach for integrating stable isotopes, other data sources, and process models to partition different sources or process components. This is accomplished via a hierarchical Bayesian framework that quantifies multiple sources of uncertainty and enables the incorporation of process models and prior information to help constrain the source-specific proportional contributions, thereby potentially avoiding identifiability issues that plague SLM models applied to \"too many\" sources. We discuss the application of the PBM model framework to three diverse examples: temporal and spatial partitioning of streamflow, estimation of plant rooting profiles and water uptake profiles (or water sources) with extension to partitioning soil and ecosystem CO 2 fluxes, and reconstructing animal diets. These examples illustrate the advantages of the PBM modeling approach, which facilitates incorporation of ecological theory and diverse sources of information into the mixing model framework, thus enabling one to partition key process components across time and space.

The widely documented phenomenon of nighttime stomatal conductance g sn could lead to substantial water loss with no carbon gain, and thus it remains unclear whether nighttime stomatal conductance confers a functional advantage. Given that studies of g sn have focused on controlled environments or small numbers of species in natural environments, a broad phylogenetic and biogeographic context could provide insights into potential adaptive benefits of g sn. We measured g sn on a diverse suite of species (n = 73) across various functional groups and climates-of-origin in a common garden to study the phylogenetic and biogeographic/climatic controls on g sn and further assessed the degree to which g sn co-varied with leaf functional traits and daytime gas-exchange rates. Closely related species were more similar in g sn than expected by chance. Herbaceous species had higher g sn than woody species. Species that typically grow in climates with lower mean annual precipitation – where the fitness cost of water loss should be the highest – generally had higher g sn. Our results reveal the highest g sn rates in species from environments where neighboring plants compete most strongly for water, suggesting a possible role for the competitive advantage of g sn.

Here we synthesize empirical research using meta-analysis to compare how consumer and resource fluxes affect recipient food webs. We tested the following hypotheses: H1) The direct effects of resource fluxes (bottom-up) should be stronger than the direct effects of consumer fluxes (top-down), because resource fluxes are permanent (do not return to the food web in which they were produced) but consumer fluxes may not be (consumers can leave). H2) Following H1, the indirect effects should attenuate (weaken) more quickly for consumer fluxes than for resource fluxes due to their direct effects being weaker. H3) The effects of resource fluxes should be stronger when recipient food webs are in different ecosystems than donor food webs due to differences in elevation that accompany cross-ecosystem food web interfaces, which should increase flux quantity due to gravity, while the effects of consumer fluxes should be stronger when donor and recipient food webs are in the same ecosystem as they should more easily assimilate into the recipient food web. We found no differences in the magnitude of bottom-up and top-down direct effects for resource and consumer fluxes, but top-down direct effects were 122% stronger than top-down indirect effects. Indirect effects of prey and predator fluxes quickly attenuated while indirect effects of non-prey resource and herbivore fluxes did not, as the overall direct effects of prey and predator fluxes were 123% and 163% stronger than their indirect effects, respectively. This result suggests that the magnitude of indirect effects decrease as the trophic level of resource and consumer fluxes increase, and also contrasts with results from studies showing in situ top-down indirect effects are stronger than in situ bottom-up indirect effects. We found that resource and consumer flux effect sizes were similar when they occurred between ecosystems, but when they occurred within ecosystems predator flux effects were 107% stronger than nutrient flux effects. Finally, we found that observational studies had higher effect sizes than manipulative studies. Future research should focus on how resource and consumer fluxes might interact and generate feedbacks in empirical studies of natural food webs, and what ecological factors might affect their relative strength.