Gross primary production responses to warming, elevated CO2 , and irrigation: quantifying the drivers of ecosystem physiology in a semiarid grassland

Determining whether the terrestrial biosphere will be a source or sink of carbon (C) under a future climate of elevated CO2 (eCO2) and warming requires accurate quantification of gross primary production (GPP), the largest flux of C in the global C cycle. We evaluated 6 years (2007–2012) of flux‐derived GPP data from the Prairie Heating and CO2 Enrichment (PHACE) experiment, situated in a grassland in Wyoming, USA. The GPP data were used to calibrate a light response model whose basic formulation has been successfully used in a variety of ecosystems. The model was extended by modeling maximum photosynthetic rate (Amax) and light‐use efficiency (Q) as functions of soil water, air temperature, vapor pressure deficit, vegetation greenness, and nitrogen at current and antecedent (past) timescales. The model fits the observed GPP well (R2 = 0.79), which was confirmed by other model performance checks that compared different variants of the model (e.g. with and without antecedent effects). Stimulation of cumulative 6‐year GPP by warming (29%, P = 0.02) and eCO2 (26%, P = 0.07) was primarily driven by enhanced C uptake during spring (129%, P = 0.001) and fall (124%, P = 0.001), respectively, which was consistent across years. Antecedent air temperature (Tairant) and vapor pressure deficit (VPDant) effects on Amax (over the past 3–4 days and 1–3 days, respectively) were the most significant predictors of temporal variability in GPP among most treatments. The importance of VPDant suggests that atmospheric drought is important for predicting GPP under current and future climate; we highlight the need for experimental studies to identify the mechanisms underlying such antecedent effects. Finally, posterior estimates of cumulative GPP under control and eCO2 treatments were tested as a benchmark against 12 terrestrial biosphere models (TBMs). The narrow uncertainties of these data‐driven GPP estimates suggest that they could be useful semi‐independent data streams for validating TBMs.
The Prairie Heating and CO2 Enrichment experiment is located in a temperate, mixed-grass prairie near Cheyenne, Wyoming (elevation = 1930 m). The PHACE experiment involves an incomplete factorial design with 30 plots randomly assigned to six treatments, with five plots per treatment level (Parton et al., 2007). The circular plots (3.4 m diameter) are separated from surrounding soil by a plastic flange buried to a depth of 60 cm (Bachman et al., 2010). The six treatments – denoted as ct, cT, Ct, CT, ct-d, and ct-s – involve different combinations of atmospheric CO2 [ambient at 380–400 ppm (denoted as ‘c’) vs. elevated at 600 ppm (‘C’)], temperature [ambient/not heated (‘t’) vs. heated by 1.5 (day) or 3.0 (night) ̊C (‘T’)], and watering [none vs. shallow (‘s’) or deep (‘d’) irrigation, which are only applied under ambient CO2 and temperature (‘ct’)]. The goal of the irrigation treatments was to increase soil moisture to approximately match that of the Ct plots by irrigating when soil moisture fell below 85% of Ct at 5–25 cm depth.

The SWC, SoilT, and micrometeorological data had occasional missing time periods or days due to instrument failure (