Functional convergence of biosphere–atmosphere interactions in
response to meteorology
Abstract. Understanding the dependencies of the terrestrial carbon and water cycle is a prerequisite to anticipate their behaviour under climate change conditions. However, terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere interact via a multitude of variables, time- and space scales. Additionally the interactions might differ among vegetation types or climatic regions. Today, novel algorithms aim to disentangle the causal structure behind such interaction from empirical data. Visualising the estimated structure in networks, the nodes represent relevant meteorological determinants and land-surface fluxes, and the links dependencies among them possibly including their lag and strength. Here we show that biosphere–atmosphere interactions are strongly shaped by meteorological conditions. For example, we find that temperate and high latitude ecosystems during peak productivity exhibit very similar biosphere–atmosphere interaction networks as tropical forests. In times of anomalous conditions like drought though, both ecosystems behave more like Mediterranean ecosystems during their dry season. Our results demonstrate that ecosystems from different climate or vegetation types have similar biosphere–atmosphere interactions if their meteorological conditions are similar. We anticipate our analysis to foster the use of network approaches as they allow a more comprehensive understanding of the state of ecosystem functioning. Long term or even irreversible changes in network structure are rare and thus can be indicators of fundamental functional ecosystem shifts.