Journal
WATER
Volume 14, Issue 19, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/w14193015
Keywords
Fagus sylvatica; anisohydric; ecohydrology; sap flow; eddy-covariance
Categories
Funding
- Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of CR within the CzeCOS program [LM2018123]
- project SustES Adaptation strategies for sustainable ecosystem services and food security under adverse environmental conditions [CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000797]
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This study investigates the partitioning of ET in a pure European beech forest and finds that the T/ET ratio is relatively low and varies significantly across different seasons. Temperature, vapor pressure deficit, and photosynthetically active radiation are found to affect the daily dynamics of T, ET, and T/ET, while soil water content has no significant effect. Mature European beech trees exhibit more anisohydric behavior.
Partitioning of evapotranspiration (ET) into transpiration (T) and residual evaporation (E) is a challenging but important task in order to assess the dynamics of increasingly scarce water resources in forest ecosystems. The T/ET ratio has been linked to the ecosystem water use efficiency of temperate forests, and thus is an important index for understanding utilization of water resources under global climate change. We used concurrent sap flow and eddy-covariance measurements to quantify the ET partitioning in pure European beech forest during the 2019-2020 period. The sap flow data were upscaled to stand level T and combined with stand level ET to calculate the T/ET ratio. We analysed intra-annual dynamics, the effect of seasonality and the impact of meteorological conditions on T, ET and T/ET. Annual T/ET of a pure European beech ecosystem was 0.48, falling at the lower end of reported global T/ET values for forest ecosystems. T/ET showed significant seasonal differences throughout spring (T/ET = 0.28), summer (T/ET = 0.62) and autumn (T/ET = 0.35). Air temperature (R-2 = 0.45-0.63), VPD (R-2 = 0.47-0.6) and PAR (R-2 = 0.32-0.63) affected the daily dynamics of T, ET and T/ET; however, soil water content (SWC) had no significant effect. Mature European beech trees showed more anisohydric behaviour and relatively stable T/ET, even under decreasing SWC. The results improve the understanding of ecosystem scale T, ET and T/ET intra-annual dynamics and environmental constraints in anisohydric mature European beech.
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