Tradeoffs in resilience and resistance strategies in biomes to perturbation
Joshua A Lerner, Texas A&M University, jlerner@tamu.edu (Presenter)
Rusty A Feagin, Texas A&M University, feaginr@tamu.edu
Thomas Huff, Texas A&M University, thuff621@gmail.com
Ecosystem disturbances are increasing in frequency and magnitude due to climate change, however, our ability to prioritize management actions is hindered by a lack of synthesis on the relative vulnerability of different biomes and ecosystems to disturbance. We delineated the terrestrial world into 14 biomes using the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) world land cover map, where each biome possessed characteristic vegetation community types adapted to specific climates and topographic relief. We extracted GPP for up to 200,000 locations per biome from the widely-available NASA MOD17 MODIS GPP product for the dates 7/12/2001 to 2/26/2022, at 8-day time intervals and 500 m resolution to compare the relative resistance and resilience of biomes across the globe in terms of their productivity and carbon flux. For resistance, or the effect size E of the ecosystem-level GPP perturbations, we found that large magnitude events were less frequent than small-sized events, and this scaling relation exhibited exponential decay. Biome effect size frequency distributions with less kurtosis appeared to be dominated by woody vegetation while distributions with higher kurtosis were dominated by grasses and shrubs. There was also clustering of biomes with shared abiotic constraints. For ecosystem resilience, we found that long return times were less frequent than short return times, with scaling that very closely followed an inverse power law function. We contend that our standardized metrics for measuring resistance and resilience in time series datasets can operationalize these terms across all disciplines, facilitating the discovery of universal patterns and tradeoffs in these two strategies.
Poster: Poster_Lerner_3-44_107_35.pdf
Associated Project(s):
Poster Location ID: 3-44
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Poster Session 3
Session Date: Thu (May 11) 3:00-5:00 PM
CCE Program: TE