Droughts damage meadows more than previously assumed
Published: Tuesday, Jan 9th 2024, 10:30
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Droughts damage plants more than previously assumed. According to an international study with Swiss participation, extreme droughts reduce plant growth by 60 percent.
"The results far exceed previously reported losses for grassland areas," researchers wrote in the study published on Monday evening in the journal Pnas (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). "Overall, our results show with unprecedented precision that the global impact of the projected increase in drought has been substantially underestimated," the study continued.
Using a standardized approach, teams on six continents simulated droughts at one hundred locations for a year. One of the locations was in Thun BE.
Artificial droughts
Researchers from the Bern University of Applied Sciences' School of Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences (BFH-HAFL) have covered six meadow areas in Thun with Plexiglas slats, allowing around 33 percent less rain to reach the ground than usual, as the university wrote in a press release on the study. This simulated the exact annual precipitation of the driest year in the last hundred years.
Six other areas of the same size, without a Plexiglas roof, were used as controls. The species composition and function of the ecosystem were recorded before, during and after the simulated drought. According to the study, plant growth was reduced by 60 percent on the areas with artificial extreme droughts. According to BFH-HAFL, plant growth is a fundamental function of the ecosystem.
More CO2 in the atmosphere
This knowledge about grasslands and shrub steppes is important, emphasized the BFH-HAFL. After all, these ecosystems cover more than 40 percent of the Earth's ice-free land area.
In addition, these findings are also important for climate change: "As grasslands and shrub steppes store more than 30 percent of the global carbon stock, they are important as carbon sinks. If there are frequent droughts, these landscapes cannot always fulfill this CO2-binding function, which would exacerbate climate change," explained BFH-HALF ecologist Andreas Stampfli, who was involved in the study, in the press release.
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