Publications by authors named "Simon Besnard"
The responses of forest carbon dynamics to fluctuations in environmental conditions at a global scale remain elusive. Despite the understanding that favourable environmental conditions promote forest growth, these responses have been challenging to observe across different ecosystems and climate gradients. Based on a global annual time series of aboveground biomass (AGB) estimated from radar satellites between 1992 and 2018, we present forest carbon changes and provide insights on their sensitivities to environmental conditions across scales.
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- - The study compares three methods for estimating ecosystem transpiration from eddy covariance data across 251 FLUXNET sites worldwide, highlighting their high correlation (R between .89 and .94) despite differing in magnitude (T/ET ranging from 45% to 77%).
- - The analysis shows that the estimated transpiration is more closely related to sap flow measurements than to other evapotranspiration estimates and that the transpiration-to-evapotranspiration ratio tends to increase with factors like drought conditions and leaf area index.
- - Findings reveal that the main drivers of spatial variability in the transpiration-to-evapotranspiration ratio are vegetation and soil characteristics rather than climate, marking a significant improvement in understanding ecosystem transp
Forests play a crucial role in the global carbon (C) cycle by storing and sequestering a substantial amount of C in the terrestrial biosphere. Due to temporal dynamics in climate and vegetation activity, there are significant regional variations in carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes between the biosphere and atmosphere in forests that are affecting the global C cycle. Current forest CO2 flux dynamics are controlled by instantaneous climate, soil, and vegetation conditions, which carry legacy effects from disturbances and extreme climate events.
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