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Continuous frost causes a greater reduction in forest growth than isolated frost in the Northern Hemisphere

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Abstract

Frost events can cause severe and often irreversible damage to leaves and canopies. The negative impacts of isolated frost events, defined as discontinuous days of extreme cold, on forests are well documented. However, a critical aspect of frost damage—its prolonged duration—is largely overlooked, even though freezing temperatures often persist for multiple consecutive days in natural environments. The impact of continuous frost events, characterized by consecutive days of extreme cold, on forest growth remains poorly understood. Using multiple remote-sensing data sources, herein we demonstrate that continuous frost events result in significantly greater declines in forest growth compared to isolated frost events across the Northern Hemisphere. Our frost-controlled experiments using seven tree species further confirm that continuous frost causes more severe damage to cell integrity and photosynthetic rate. Using GPP and climate data simulated by CMIP6 models, we find that continuous frost events significantly reduce forest growth by the end of this century, with the largest reductions observed under high-emission scenarios. Our findings underscore the importance of accounting for the prolonged duration of frost events to fully capture their impacts on forest ecosystems, as failing to consider this factor may lead to underestimation of frost-induced effects on forest growth and carbon cycling under climate change.

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Data availability

The MODIS gross primary productivity and net primary production data sourced from https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mod17a2hv006/, and the global all-sky daily average solar-induced fluorescence dataset was obtained from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.6387494. MODIS enhanced vegetation index and evapotranspiration were obtained from https://www.glass.hku.hk/index.html. The palmer drought severity index was sourced from https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/, and the global aridity index was sourced from https://cgiarcsi.community/data/global-aridity-and-pet-database/. Future gross primary productivity projections were sourced from https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/esgf-llnl/. Daily minimum temperature data were acquired from the climatic research unit and Japanese reanalysis climate dataset (CRU JRA v2.4) (https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/), with future temperature projections obtained from the NorESM2-MM and CMCC-ESM2 model (https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/esgf-llnl/). The frost-damage experimental data generated in this study have been deposited in the Source data (Fig. 4). Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The primary codes used in this study are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30069994.v1.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded and supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2023YFF0806600) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32271833, 32401380).

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  1. These authors contributed equally: Hongjun Yang, Wenjing Tao, Juan Chen.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Bio-Resource and Eco-Environment of Ministry of Education, College of Life Sciences, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China

    Hongjun Yang, Qin Yan, Yuchuan Yang, Haoyu Qiu, Junkai Ma & Lei Chen

  2. Key Laboratory of Eco-environments in Three Gorges Reservoir Region of Ministry of Education, School of Life Sciences, Southwest University, Chongqing, China

    Wenjing Tao & Juan Chen

  3. CSIC, Global Ecology Unit CREAF-CSIC-UAB, Barcelona, Spain

    Josep Peñuelas

  4. CREAF, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Catalonia, Spain

    Josep Peñuelas

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  1. Hongjun Yang
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Contributions

L.C. conceived and designed the research. H.Y., W.T., J.C., and L.C. performed the data analysis. H.Y. wrote the paper with the inputs of W.T., J.C., Q.Y., Y.Y., H.Q., J.M., J.P., and L.C. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the results and approved the final manuscript.

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Lei Chen.

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Yang, H., Tao, W., Chen, J. et al. Continuous frost causes a greater reduction in forest growth than isolated frost in the Northern Hemisphere.
Nat Commun (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67861-8

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