Climate change will cause non-analog vegetation states in Africa and commit vegetation to long-term change

Pfeiffer, Mirjam; Kumar, Dushyant; Martens, Carola; Scheiter, Simon

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-5829-2020

Articles | Volume 17, issue 22

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-5829-2020

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-5829-2020

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

Articles | Volume 17, issue 22

Research article

|

27 Nov 2020

Research article |

| 27 Nov 2020

Climate change will cause non-analog vegetation states in Africa and commit vegetation to long-term change

Mirjam Pfeiffer, Dushyant Kumar, Carola Martens, and Simon Scheiter

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-5829-2020-supplement

Data sets

Additional supplementary material (videos, output data, data analysis and plotting scripts) Mirjam Pfeiffer, Dushyant Kumar, Carola Martens, and Simon Scheiter https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/64MGK

Model code and software

aDGVM source code Mirjam Pfeiffer, Dushyant Kumar, Carola Martens, and Simon Scheiter https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4108449

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Short summary

Lags caused by delayed vegetation response to changing environmental conditions can lead to disequilibrium vegetation states. Awareness of this issue is relevant for ecosystem conservation. We used the aDGVM vegetation model to quantify the difference between transient and equilibrium vegetation states in Africa during the 21st century for two potential climate trajectories. Lag times increased over time and vegetation was non-analog to any equilibrium state due to multi-lag composite states.