Patterns and trends of the dominant environmental controls of net biome productivity

Marcolla, Barbara; Migliavacca, Mirco; Rödenbeck, Christian; Cescatti, Alessandro

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-2365-2020

Articles | Volume 17, issue 8

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-2365-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-2365-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 17, issue 8

Research article

|

30 Apr 2020

Research article |

| 30 Apr 2020

Patterns and trends of the dominant environmental controls of net biome productivity

Barbara Marcolla, Mirco Migliavacca, Christian Rödenbeck, and Alessandro Cescatti

Download

Final revised paper (published on 30 Apr 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 04 Nov 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

RC1: 'Recent changes in the dominant environmental controls of net biome productivity', Anonymous Referee #1, 24 Nov 2019
- AC1: 'answers to reviewer1's comments', Alessandro Cescatti, 11 Feb 2020
RC2: 'Marcolla et al - review', Anonymous Referee #2, 25 Nov 2019
- AC2: 'answers to reviewer2's comments', Alessandro Cescatti, 11 Feb 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (11 Feb 2020) by Paul Stoy

AR by Alessandro Cescatti on behalf of the Authors (12 Feb 2020) Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (14 Feb 2020) by Paul Stoy

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (18 Feb 2020)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (29 Feb 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Marcolla and others investigate the sensitivity of the global carbon cycle to environmental driviers. Many aspects of the analysis are interesting and publishable, but I feel that there are many literature references missing and I attempted to provide a few fundamental papers in the minor comments below to help justify the choices made with respect to the moving window averaging and modeling using a linear decomposition.

I disagree with a central premise: “less is known about the key drivers of the sub-annual variability of the fluxes” on line 15. I feel that quite a bit is known about sub-annual variability but how this changes over time (i.e. interannually) is an ongoing question. In other words, the statement at line23 points to the novelty of this study but sub-annual fluxes alone have been the subject of lots and lots of research. A simple rephrasing should do.

I am curious to know how changes in vapor pressure deficit may be a more effective metric for estimating water stress impacts as shown by a number of recent studies. This paper from last week is merely the most recent one that I know of on this critical topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168192320300320

I am a bit surprised that the authors do not cite this rather fundamental study of time-scale dependence of surface-atmosphere exchange: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030917080100029X
Noting this and subsequent analyses on these issues can improve statements like on line 58:
‘However, it is at the weekly or monthly scales where climate variability is directly acting on ecosystems’ to note that climate is also a strong control on diurnal timescales.

Note please also the importance of VPD on line 94.

105: the moving window analysis is interesting but there are so many other nice methods from time series analysis (starting with simple Fourier decomposition) for doing this. Please justify the simpler approach. The justification for the GLM is nice.

The approach on line 134 is interesting, but can linearity really be assumed? The approach in Ahlstroem et al. (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6237/895) is perhaps a start on some of these topics. I am not suggestiong necessarily to change the approach, but am interested in learning more about the justification for choosing the approach that the authors did.

235: ‘the occurrence of light-limited photosynthesis’: might ‘global brightening’ (see multiple references by Wild et al.) be playing a role?

Hide

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (04 Mar 2020) by Paul Stoy

AR by Alessandro Cescatti on behalf of the Authors (13 Mar 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (18 Mar 2020) by Paul Stoy

AR by Alessandro Cescatti on behalf of the Authors (20 Mar 2020) Manuscript

Download

Article (6036 KB)
Full-text XML

Short summary

This work investigates the sensitivity of terrestrial CO₂ fluxes to climate drivers. We observed that CO₂ flux is mostly controlled by temperature during the growing season and by radiation off season. We also observe that radiation importance is increasing over time while sensitivity to temperature is decreasing in Eurasia. Ultimately this analysis shows that ecosystem response to climate is changing, with potential repercussions for future terrestrial sink and land role in climate mitigation.