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Asymmetric impacts of forest gain and loss on tropical land surface temperature

Nature Geoscience volume 17, pages 426–432 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Forest gain in the tropics can cool the land surface by altering the energy budget through biophysical processes. Many countries have adopted forestation as part of their strategies for tackling climate warming. However, the biophysical effects of forest gain have generally been estimated based on the symmetrical reversal of ongoing tropical forest loss. Here we use multiple sources of satellite remote sensing data to explore the sensitivities of land surface temperature to forest gain and loss, and find forest loss warming the surface by 0.56 ± 0.12 °C and forest gain cooling the surface by 0.10 ± 0.09 °C. This asymmetry indicates weaker biophysical effects of forest gain on local temperature, which we attribute to contrasting changes of vegetation properties, such as leaf area and greenness. We find that current Earth system models fail to capture the observed asymmetry and thus could overestimate the cooling effect of afforestation in future. This highlights the need to improve representation of forest demographic impacts on biophysics-related vegetation properties, such as leaf area index, albedo and canopy structure, to better estimate the effects of tropical forestation on surface temperature.

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Fig. 1: LST responses to forest cover change during 2003–2013 in the tropics.
Fig. 2: Spatial pattern of the differences between the sensitivities of daytime LST (13:30) to forest loss and gain (\(\Delta{\boldsymbol{\gamma }}_{{\mathbf{LST}}}={\boldsymbol{\gamma }}_{{\mathbf{LST}}}^{{\mathbf{loss}}}-{\boldsymbol{\gamma }}_{{\mathbf{LST}}}^{{\mathbf{gain}}}\)) during 2003 and 2013.
Fig. 3: Impacts on vegetation properties of forest cover loss and gain in the tropics.
Fig. 4: Impacts on surface temperature of forest cover change (γTs) in the tropics estimated using CMIP6 models.

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Data availability

All data used in the study are open access: MODIS MYD11A2 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/myd11a2v061/); MODIS MOD11A2 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mod11a2v061/); GFCC (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/gfcc30tcv003/); Hansen GFC (https://storage.googleapis.com/earthenginepartners-hansen/GFC-2020-v1.8/download.html); MODIS MOD44B (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mod44bv061/); MODIS MCD12Q1 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mcd12q1v061/); ESA CCI land cover (http://maps.elie.ucl.ac.be/CCI/viewer/download.php); Hilda+ land cover (https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.921846); GlobeLand30 (https://www.cnopendata.com/en/data/m/meteorological/china-globeLand30.html); SRTMGL3 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/srtmgl3v003/); MODIS MYD15A2H (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/myd15a2hv061/); MODIS MCD43A4 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mcd43a4v061/); MODIS MYD13A1 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/myd13a1v061/); MODIS MYD16A2 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/myd16a2v006/); MODIS MCD43A3 (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mcd43a3v061/); GEDI forest canopy height (https://glad.umd.edu/dataset/gedi/); AGB from ref. 28 (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6103053); and CMIP6 (https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/cmip6/). Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The codes used to analyse data and create the figures are available via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25239877 (ref. 66). All the processing codes are available from the corresponding author on request.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (grant no. 2019YFA0607302) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 42171096). We also acknowledge the support by the High-performance Computing Platform of Peking University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Carbon Neutrality, Sino-French Institute for Earth System Science, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Yuxiang Zhang, Xuhui Wang, Xu Lian & Shilong Piao

  2. Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Xu Lian

  3. Center for Agricultural Water Research in China, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China

    Sien Li

  4. Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Yue Li

  5. Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Chi Chen

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Contributions

X.W. designed the research. Y.Z. performed analyses and drafted the figures. Y.Z., X.W. and X.L. wrote the manuscript with help from S.L., Y.L., C.C. and S.P. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the results.

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Correspondence to Xuhui Wang.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Edouard Davin, Shruti Nath and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Tom Richardson, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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Zhang, Y., Wang, X., Lian, X. et al. Asymmetric impacts of forest gain and loss on tropical land surface temperature. Nat. Geosci. 17, 426–432 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01423-3

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