Enhanced drought resistance of vegetation growth in cities due to urban heat, CO2 domes and O3 troughs
Abstract Sustained increase in atmospheric CO2 is strongly coupled with rising temperature and persistent droughts. While elevated CO2 promotes photosynthesis and growth of vegetation, drier and warmer climate tends to negate this benefit, complicating the prediction of future terrestrial carbon dynamics. Manipulative studies such as Free Air CO2 Enrichment experiments have been useful to study the interaction effect of global change factors on vegetation growth; however, their results do not easily transfer to natural ecosystems partly due to their short-duration nature and limited consideration of climatic gradients and potential confounding factors, such as O3. Urban environments serve as a useful small-scale analogy of future climate. Here, we develop a data-driven approach using urban environments as test beds for revealing the interactive effect of changing temperature and CO2 on vegetation response to drought. Using 75 urban-rural paired plots from three climate zones over the conterminous United States (CONUS), we find vegetation in urban areas exhibits a much stronger resistance to drought than in rural areas and the enhanced drought resistance across CONUS is attributed to rising temperature and CO2 and reduced O3 concentration in cities. The controlling factor(s) responsible for urban-rural differences in drought resistance of vegetation varies across climate regions, such as surface O3 gradients in the arid climate, and surface CO2 and O3 gradients in the temperate and continental climates. Thus, our study provides new observational insights on the impacts of competing factors on vegetation growth at a large scale, and ultimately, helps reduce uncertainties in understanding terrestrial carbon dynamics.