Warming and drought weaken the carbon sink capacity of an endangered paleoendemic temperate rainforest in South America.

ABSTRACT: Measurements of ecosystem carbon (C) fluxes in temperate forests are concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere, leaving the functionally diverse temperate forests in the Southern Hemisphere underrepresented. Here, we report three years (February 2018-January 2021) of C fluxes, studied with eddy-covariance and closed chamber techniques, in an endangered temperate evergreen rainforest of the long-lived paleoendemic South American conifer Fitzroya cupressoides. Using classification and regression trees we analyzed the most relevant drivers and thresholds of daily net ecosystem exchange (NEE) and soil respiration. The annual NEE showed that the forest was a moderate C sink during the period analyzed (-287±38 g C m^-2 year ^-1). We found that the capacity to capture C o

SUBMITTER: Perez-Quezada JF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7614759 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature