Vegetation-climate feedbacks across scales

TL;DR

This paper reviews how vegetation influences climate across various scales, affecting circulation, precipitation, and extreme events, emphasizing the importance of understanding these feedbacks for climate prediction and modeling.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of vegetation-climate feedback mechanisms across scales, highlighting recent research and identifying gaps in understanding.

Findings

Vegetation impacts surface energy and water cycles significantly.

Vegetation feedbacks influence large-scale atmospheric circulation.

Recent studies improve understanding of vegetation effects on extreme events.

Abstract

Vegetation often understood merely as the result of long-term climate conditions. However, vegetation itself plays a fundamental role in shaping Earth's climate by regulating the energy, water, and biogeochemical cycles across terrestrial landscapes. It exerts influence by altering surface roughness, consuming significant water resources through transpiration and interception, lowering atmospheric CO2 concentration, and controlling net radiation and its partitioning into sensible and latent heat fluxes. This influence propagates through the atmosphere, from microclimate scales to the entire atmospheric boundary layer, subsequently impacting large-scale circulation and the global transport of heat and moisture. Understanding the feedbacks between vegetation and atmosphere across multiple scales is crucial for predicting the influence of land use and cover changes and for accurately representing these processes in climate models. This short review aims to discuss the mechanisms through which vegetation modulates climate across spatial and temporal scales. Particularly, we evaluate the influence of vegetation on circulation patterns, precipitation and temperature, both in terms of trends and extreme events, such as droughts and heatwaves. The main goal is to highlight the state of science and review recent studies that may help advance our collective understanding of vegetation feedbacks and the role they play in climate.