Incident radiation and the allocation of nitrogen within Arctic plant canopies : implications for predicting gross primary productivity

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2012-01Author
Street, Lorna E.
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Shaver, Gaius R.
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Rastetter, Edward B.
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van Wijk, Mark T.
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Kaye, Brooke A.
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Williams, Mathew
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https://hdl.handle.net/1912/5583As published
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2012.02754.xKeyword
Carbon balance; Climate change; Gross primary production; Diffuse radiation; Tundra vegetation; CO2 flux; Specific leaf area; Light extinction; Nitrogen extinctionAbstract
Arctic vegetation is characterized by high spatial variability in plant functional type (PFT) composition and gross primary productivity (P). Despite this variability, the two main drivers of P in sub-Arctic tundra are leaf area index (LT) and total foliar nitrogen (NT). LT and NT have been shown to be tightly coupled across PFTs in sub-Arctic tundra vegetation, which simplifies up-scaling by allowing quantification of the main drivers of P from remotely sensed LT. Our objective was to test the LT–NT relationship across multiple Arctic latitudes and to assess LT as a predictor of P for the pan-Arctic. Including PFT-specific parameters in models of LT–NT coupling provided only incremental improvements in model fit, but significant improvements were gained from including site-specific parameters. The degree of curvature in the LT–NT relationship, controlled by a fitted canopy nitrogen extinction co-efficient, was negatively related to average levels of diffuse radiation at a site. This is consistent with theoretical predictions of more uniform vertical canopy N distributions under diffuse light conditions. Higher latitude sites had higher average leaf N content by mass (NM), and we show for the first time that LT–NT coupling is achieved across latitudes via canopy-scale trade-offs between NM and leaf mass per unit leaf area (LM). Site-specific parameters provided small but significant improvements in models of P based on LT and moss cover. Our results suggest that differences in LT–NT coupling between sites could be used to improve pan-Arctic models of P and we provide unique evidence that prevailing radiation conditions can significantly affect N allocation over regional scales.
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Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of John Wiley & Sons for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Global Change Biology 18 (2012): 2838–2852, doi:10.1111/j.1365-2486.2012.02754.x.
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Preprint: Street, Lorna E., Shaver, Gaius R., Rastetter, Edward B., van Wijk, Mark T., Kaye, Brooke A., Williams, Mathew, "Incident radiation and the allocation of nitrogen within Arctic plant canopies : implications for predicting gross primary productivity", 2012-01, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2012.02754.x, https://hdl.handle.net/1912/5583Related items
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