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- Title
Age‐mediation of tree‐growth responses to experimental warming in the northeastern Tibetan Plateau.
- Authors
Du, Jun; Li, Kai; He, Zhibin; Chen, Longfei; Zhu, Xi; Lin, Pengfei
- Abstract
The trajectory of tree‐growth response to climate warming may be related to attributes like tree age. However, age‐mediation of temperature sensitivity of tree growth has received little attention. This study aimed to determine how age affects tree growth in a future warmer world. In a 2‐year ecosystem warming experiment in the northeastern Tibetan Plateau of China, we explored the response of Qinghai spruce saplings at two life stages to two warming levels. Our results indicated a significant interaction between warming and age for sapling growth of Qinghai spruce. In high‐level warming scenario, the experiment increased growing season air temperatures by approximately 1.0°C and annual growing degree‐days by 38%. In response, warmed saplings lengthened the growing season by 10 days on average and increased the final shoot length to a maximum of 104% compared to control groups. Comparison of age classes revealed that old saplings exhibited significantly higher temperature sensitivity than young saplings. This performance may be caused by the differences in adaptive strategy to the asymmetric warming occurring during the whole day. Increased daytime temperature was expected to significantly enhance leaf photosynthesis, whereas lack of obvious nighttime warming would effectively restrict autotrophic respiration, thus resulting in the higher growth rate of old saplings compared with young saplings. Moreover, lack of nighttime warming rendered young saplings to be still in high stresses of freezing injury at low temperatures. These findings highlight the need for additional research on the effects of further climate anomalies on tree species during their ontogenetic processes. In this study, we explored the response of Qinghai spruce (Picea crassifolia) saplings at two life stages to two projected warming levels and aimed to determine how age structure affects tree growth in a future warmer world, which has received litter attention in previous researches. Our results indicated that temperature increases beyond the annual variability generally altered the spring phenological niches and shoot growth rate and that age mediated sapling growth in response to experimental warming. These findings suggested that the results obtained from these studies of deciduous tree species may therefore not be valuable for the inference of climate signal age effects on leaf phenology and shoot growth of evergreen conifers.
- Subjects
PLANT growth; GLOBAL warming; ATMOSPHERIC temperature; SPRUCE; CONIFERS
- Publication
Ecology & Evolution (20457758), 2019, Vol 9, Issue 4, p2242
- ISSN
2045-7758
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1002/ece3.4920