Atmospheric temperature and humidity demonstrated strong correlation with productivity in tropical moist deciduous forests

• Published in: Environmental monitoring and assessment 2023-01, Vol.195 (1), p.69-69, Article 69
• Main Authors: Behera, Soumit Kumar, Behera, Mukunda Dev, Tuli, Rakesh, Barik, Saroj K.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agriculture; Air temperature; Atmospheric Protection/Air Quality Control/Air Pollution; Atmospheric temperature; Biodiversity; Complementarity; Deciduous forests; Deciduous trees; Earth and Environmental Science; Ecological research; Ecology; Ecotoxicology; Environment; Environmental Management; Environmental monitoring; Environmental science; Forest communities; Forests; Humidity; Leaf area; Leaf area index; Mixed forests; Monitoring/Environmental Analysis; Net Primary Productivity; Plant communities; Primary production; Principal components analysis; Productivity; Protected areas; Species diversity; Species richness; Tropical atmosphere; Tropical forests
• ISSN: 0167-6369; 1573-2959
• DOI: 10.1007/s10661-022-10668-7

Tropical forests sequester six times higher carbon than that released by humans annually into the atmosphere. These biodiversity-rich tropical forests have high net primary productivity (NPP), which differs among constituent plant communities. Tropical moist deciduous forests occupy 179,335 km 2 of India’s geographical area and constitute 44% of the country’s total protected area (PA) forests. The productivity of these forests has neither been estimated specifically nor precisely. We measured the annual NPP of three predominant distinct community types, viz., mixed (DM), sal (SM), and teak (TP), in a tropical moist deciduous forest in northern India. The NPP was estimated from tree biomass data collected from nine long-term ecological research (LTER) plots of 1 ha each representing the above three community types. The estimated annual NPP were 10.28, 6.25, and 9.79 Mg ha −1  year −1 in DM; 8.93, 7.09, and 10.59 Mg ha −1  year −1 in SM; and 14.57, 7.14, and 13.56 Mg ha −1  year −1 in TP for the years 2010, 2011, and 2012, respectively. The NPP was correlated with tree density, height and DBH, species richness, diversity, microclimatic and edaphic variables, and leaf area index (LAI) using principal component analysis (PCA) and generalized linear modeling (GLM). Air temperature and humidity were strongly related to NPP in all the community types, while “complementarity” and “selection effects” contributed to the NPP in both the sal and mixed forest communities with equal importance, and the NPP in teak plantation ould point to “dominance effect.”