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Forest water use is increasingly decoupled from water availability even during severe drought

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Abstract

Context

Key to understanding forest water balances is the role of tree species regulating evapotranspiration (ET), but the synergistic impact of forest species composition, topography, and water availability on ET and how this shapes drought sensitivity across the landscape remains unclear.

Objectives

Our aims were to quantify (1) the effect of forest composition and topography including elevation and hillslope gradients on the relationship between ET and water availability, and (2) whether the relationship has changed over time.

Methods

We used remotely sensed Landsat and MODIS ET to quantify forest ET across the Blue Ridge ecoregion of the southeastern USA. Then quantified metrics describing ET responses to water availability and trends in responses over time and assessed how these metrics varied across elevation, hillslope, and forest composition gradients.

Results

We demonstrated forest ET is becoming less constrained by water availability at the expense of lateral flow. Drought impacts on ET diverged along elevation and hillslope gradients, and that divergence was more pronounced with increasingly severe drought, indicating high elevation and drier, upslope regions tend to maintain ET rates even during extreme drought. We identified a decoupling of ET from water availability over time, and found this process was accelerated at higher elevations and in areas with more diffuse-porous trees.

Conclusions

Given the large proportion of forests on the landscape distributed across high elevation and upslope positions, reductions in downslope water availability could be widespread, amplifying vulnerability of runoff, the health of downslope vegetation, and aquatic biodiversity.

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Data availability

All data used in this study was publicly available online. Eddy covariance data was downloaded from Ameriflux (https://ameriflux.lbl.gov/sites/siteinfo/US-Cwt). GRIDMET SPI data, land cover data, and USGS NED data was downloaded from Google Earth Engine (https://earthengine.google.com/). MODIS ET data was downloaded from USGS (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mod16a2gfv006/). Landsat ET data was downloaded from USGS (https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/nli/landsat/landsat-provisional-actual-evapotranspiration). The Riley et al. (2021) forest composition map was downloaded from the USDA Forest Service (https://www.fs.usda.gov/rds/archive/Catalog/RDS-2019-0026). The Wilson et al. (2013) forest composition maps were downloaded from the USDA forest service (https://www.fs.usda.gov/rds/archive/catalog/RDS-2013-0013).

Code availability

R scripts used for analysis and visualization are available on request.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Center for Geospatial Analytics at NC State University, a Nature Conservancy NatureNet fellowship, and a U.S. Geological Survey Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center graduate fellowship awarded to Katie McQuillan.

Funding

This research was funded by the Center for Geospatial Analytics at NC State University, a Nature Conservancy NatureNet fellowship, and a U.S. Geological Survey Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center graduate fellowship awarded to Katie McQuillan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Geospatial Analytics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA

    Katie A. McQuillan, Mirela G. Tulbure & Katherine L. Martin

  2. Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA

    Mirela G. Tulbure & Katherine L. Martin

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  1. Katie A. McQuillan
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  2. Mirela G. Tulbure
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Contributions

KAM: Conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, writing—original draft. MGT: Methodology, revisions. KLM: Conceptualization, methodology, writing and revisions.

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Correspondence to Katie A. McQuillan.

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McQuillan, K.A., Tulbure, M.G. & Martin, K.L. Forest water use is increasingly decoupled from water availability even during severe drought. Landsc Ecol 37, 1801–1817 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-022-01425-9

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