Open AccessRevisiting assessments of ecosystem drought recovery
Author(s) -
Laibao Liu,
Lukas Gudmundsson,
Mathias Hauser,
Dahe Qin,
Shuangcheng Li,
Sonia I. Seneviratne
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
environmental research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.37
H-Index - 124
ISSN - 1748-9326
DOI - 10.1088/1748-9326/ab4c61
Subject(s) - ecosystem , environmental science , tropics , high latitude , identification (biology) , period (music) , environmental resource management , latitude , geography , ecology , biology , physics , geodesy , acoustics
The time taken for ecosystems to recover from drought (drought recovery time) is critically important for the ecosystem state. However, recent literature presents contradictory conclusions on this feature: one study concludes that drought recovery time in the tropics and high northern latitudes is shortest ( 12 months) in these regions. Here we explore the reasons for these contradictory results and revisit assessments of drought recovery time. We find that the study period, drought identification method and recovery level definition are main factors contributing to the contradictory conclusions. Further, we emphasize that including droughts that did not decrease ecosystem production or using a period of abnormal water availability to define ecosystem recovery level can strongly bias drought recovery time estimates. Based on our refined methods, we find the drought recovery time is also longest in some tropical regions but not in high northern latitudes during 1901–2010. Our study helps to resolve the recent controversy and provides insight for future drought recovery assessments.