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Relationships among phenology, climate and biomass across subtropical forests in Argentina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2018

Cecilia Blundo ,
Nestor I. Gasparri ,
Agustina Malizia ,
Matthew Clark ,
Genoveva Gatti ,
Paula I. Campanello ,
H. Ricardo Grau ,
Leonardo Paolini ,
Lucio R. Malizia  and
Sandra E. Chediack
...Show all authors
Cecilia Blundo*
Affiliation:
Instituto de Ecología Regional, Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. CONICET. Yerba Buena, Argentina
Nestor I. Gasparri
Affiliation:
Instituto de Ecología Regional, Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. CONICET. Yerba Buena, Argentina
Agustina Malizia
Affiliation:
Instituto de Ecología Regional, Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. CONICET. Yerba Buena, Argentina
Matthew Clark
Affiliation:
Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Analysis, Department of Geography, Environment and Planning, Sonoma State University, CA, USA
Genoveva Gatti
Affiliation:
Instituto de Biología Subtropical, Facultad de Ciencias Forestales, Universidad Nacional de Misiones. CONICET. Puerto Iguazú, Argentina
Paula I. Campanello
Affiliation:
Instituto de Biología Subtropical, Facultad de Ciencias Forestales, Universidad Nacional de Misiones. CONICET. Puerto Iguazú, Argentina
H. Ricardo Grau
Affiliation:
Instituto de Ecología Regional, Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. CONICET. Yerba Buena, Argentina
Leonardo Paolini
Affiliation:
Instituto de Ecología Regional, Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. CONICET. Yerba Buena, Argentina
Lucio R. Malizia
Affiliation:
Centro de Estudios Territoriales Ambientales y Sociales, Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias, Universidad Nacional de Jujuy. San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina
Sandra E. Chediack
Affiliation:
Investigadora independiente. San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, México
Patricio MacDonagh
Affiliation:
Facultad de Ciencias Forestales, Universidad Nacional de Misiones. Eldorado, Argentina
Guillermo Goldstein
Affiliation:
Laboratorio de Ecología Funcional, Universidad de Buenos Aires. CONICET. Buenos Aires, Argentina
*
*Corresponding author. Email: ccblundo@gmail.com
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Abstract:

Phenology is a key ecosystem process that reflects climate–vegetation functioning, and is an indicator of global environmental changes. Recently, it has been suggested that land-use change and timber extraction promote differences in forest phenology. We use remote-sensing data to describe regional leaf phenological patterns in combination with field data from 131 plots in old-growth and disturbed forests distributed over subtropical forests of Argentina (54–65°W). We assessed how climate is related to phenological patterns, and analysed how changes in forest structural characteristics such as stock of above-ground biomass relate to the observed phenological signals across the gradient. We found that the first three axes of a principal component analysis explained 85% of the variation in phenological metrics across subtropical forests, ordering plots mainly along indicators of seasonality and productivity. At the regional scale, the relative importance of forest biomass in explaining variation in phenological patterns was about 15%. Climate showed the highest relative importance, with temperature and rainfall explaining Enhanced Vegetation Index metrics related to seasonality and productivity patterns (27% and 47%, respectively). Within forest types, climate explains the major fraction of variation in phenological patterns, suggesting that forest function may be particularly sensitive to climate change. We found that forest biomass contributed to explaining a proportion of leaf phenological variation within three of the five forest types studied, and this may be related to changes in species composition, probably as a result of forest use.

Keywords

biomassclimateenhanced vegetation indexMODISpermanent plotsphenologysubtropical forests
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Tropical Ecology , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , March 2018 , pp. 93 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

4

Centro de Estudios Ambientales Integrados, Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco, CONICET. Esquel, Argentina (Present address)

References

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