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Warming overwhelms CO2-driven drought mitigation in alpine vegetation on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

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Abstract

Droughts have intensified under climate change, threatening ecosystem stability. While rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations may enhance vegetation drought resistance, the net effect remains uncertain amid concurrent warming. Here we combine ecological modeling with multi-source observations to investigate how CO2 and warming jointly regulate vegetation drought responses on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, a sensitive alpine region exposed to escalating drought threats under changing precipitation regimes. Using factorial scenarios to isolate individual forcings, we show that 40-year CO2 rise mitigated drought-induced productivity losses by 5.7 ± 0.9% under constant temperature. However, in the presence of warming, rising CO2 intensifies drought stress by 5.2 ± 0.5%, reflecting increased plant water demand and disrupted regional water supply-demand balance. Permafrost areas experienced the strongest CO2-driven drought alleviation under constant temperature, but also the greatest warming-induced reversal. These findings reveal interacting CO2-warming impacts on alpine vegetation drought responses, highlighting ecological risks for the plateau and other permafrost-dominant regions under future warming.

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Data availability

Source data used to generate figures have been deposited in the Science Data Bank and are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.36264. Other publicly available datasets include: the China Meteorological Forcing Data (CMFD) (https://doi.org/10.11888/AtmosphericPhysics.tpe.249369.file); the Climatic Research Unit gridded Time Series (CRU TS) v4.07 (https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/cru_ts_4.07/); soil data obtained from SoilGrids (https://www.isric.org/explore/soilgrids); annual time series of [CO2] between 1979 and 2018 obtained from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Earth System Research Laboratory (NOAA) (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/); the dataset of annual GPP over China’s terrestrial ecosystems during 2000–2020 (ChinaFLUX20) (https://doi.org/10.11922/11-6035.csd.2023.0037.zh); a global OCO-2-based solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence dataset (GOSIF v2) (https://globalecology.unh.edu/); a long-term global GPP dataset based on the near-infrared (NIR) reflectance of vegetation (NIRv) (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12981977.v2); the Global Land Evaporation Amsterdam Model (GLEAM) v3 (https://www.gleam.eu/); the Simple Terrestrial Hydrosphere Model (SiTHv2) (https://doi.org/10.11888/Terre.tpdc.300751); records from the China River Sediment Bulletin published by the Ministry of Water Resources of China (http://www.mwr.gov.cn/); the Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC) (https://www.bafg.de/GRDC/); TRENDY-v12 dataset (https://mdosullivan.github.io/GCB/); the vegetation map of China (1:1,000,000) (https://www.plantplus.cn/en/doi/10.12282/plantdata.0155).

Code availability

Scripts used to generate Figs. 2–5 are available at https://github.com/helv716/code_for_figures_lpjguess_QTP. All scripts were written in Python (v3.10). Figure 1 is a hand-drawn conceptual diagram and is therefore not included in the repository.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China National R&D Program (2022YFF0801904), National Natural Science Foundation of China (32301383, 32471669), Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation (LR24C030001, LZ23C030001), Key Research and Development Program of Zhejiang (2024C03244), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (226-2024-00187). The authors acknowledge technical support by Paul Miller, Jing Tang, Johan Nord, Stefan Olin, Thomas Pugh, and Drew Holzworth. The authors also acknowledge all the modelers involved in the TRENDY project for providing access to their simulation data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Vegetation Structure, Function and Construction (VegLab), College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

    He Lyu, Xueqian Zhang, Jian Su, Chen Chen & Mingkai Jiang

  2. Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    David Wårlind & Benjamin Smith

  3. School of Life Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, Australia

    Jürgen Knauer

  4. Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain

    Lina Teckentrup

  5. Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Agricultural Remote Sensing and Information Technology, College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

    Jinfeng Chang

  6. State Key Laboratory of Earth System Numerical Modeling and Application, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Xiyan Xu

  7. Key Laboratory of Ecosystem Network Observation and Modeling, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Juntao Zhu

  8. College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, Zhejiang, China

    Jian Ni

  9. Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Stephen Sitch

  10. College of Water Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Yongshuo Fu

  11. Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia

    Belinda Medlyn & Benjamin Smith

  12. Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Yuanhe Yang

  13. China National Botanical Garden, Beijing, China

    Yuanhe Yang

  14. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Yuanhe Yang

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  1. He Lyu
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Contributions

M.J. and H.L. conceived the study. H.L., D.W., and J.K. modified the model. H.L., X.Z., and C.C. collected the data. H.L. and X.Z. preprocessed the data for model simulation and evaluation. H.L. conducted model simulations and performed the analysis. H.L. wrote the first draft with contributions from J.S., X.Z., and M.J. All co-authors (H.L., X.Z., J.S., D.W., J.K., L.T., J.C., X.X., C.C., J.Z., J.N., S.S., Y.F., B.M., B.S., Y.Y., and M.J.) contributed to the discussion and revision of the manuscript.

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Mingkai Jiang.

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J.C. is an Editorial Board Member for Communications Earth & Environment, but was not involved in the editorial review of, nor the decision to publish this article. The authors declare no other competing interests.

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Lyu, H., Zhang, X., Su, J. et al. Warming overwhelms CO2-driven drought mitigation in alpine vegetation on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.
Commun Earth Environ (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03308-2

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