Characterizing the Response of Vegetation Cover to Water Limitation in Africa Using Geostationary Satellites

Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems

卷:14

Nuno Carvalhais¹  Martin Jung¹  Çağlar Küçük¹  Sujan Koirala¹  Markus Reichstein¹  Diego G. Miralles² 

[1] Department of Biogeochemical Integration Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry Jena Germany;

[2] Hydro‐Climate Extremes Lab (H‐CEL) Faculty of Bioscience Engineering Ghent University Ghent Belgium;

关键词: Africa;    fractional vegetation cover;    geostationary;    ecohydrology;    water limitation;   

DOI  :  10.1029/2021MS002730

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Abstract Hydrological interactions between vegetation, soil, and topography are complex, and heterogeneous in semi‐arid landscapes. This along with data scarcity poses challenges for large‐scale modeling of vegetation‐water interactions. Here, we exploit metrics derived from daily Meteosat data over Africa at ca. 5 km spatial resolution for ecohydrological analysis. Their spatial patterns are based on Fractional Vegetation Cover (FVC) time series and emphasize limiting conditions of the seasonal wet to dry transition: the minimum and maximum FVC of temporal record, the FVC decay rate and the FVC integral over the decay period. We investigate the relevance of these metrics for large scale ecohydrological studies by assessing their co‐variation with soil moisture, and with topographic, soil, and vegetation factors. Consistent with our initial hypothesis, FVC minimum and maximum increase with soil moisture, while the FVC integral and decay rate peak at intermediate soil moisture. We find evidence for the relevance of topographic moisture variations in arid regions, which, counter‐intuitively, is detectable in the maximum but not in the minimum FVC. We find no clear evidence for wide‐spread occurrence of the “inverse texture effect” on FVC. The FVC integral over the decay period correlates with independent data sets of plant water storage capacity or rooting depth while correlations increase with aridity. In arid regions, the FVC decay rate decreases with canopy height and tree cover fraction as expected for ecosystems with a more conservative water‐use strategy. Thus, our observation‐based products have large potential for better understanding complex vegetation‐water interactions from regional to continental scales.

【 授权许可】

Unknown