Title: Increasing contribution of peatlands to boreal evapotranspiration in a warming climate

Citation: See "Supplemental Information Summary"

Study Site: Global

Purpose: The response of evapotranspiration (ET) to warming is of critical importance to the water and carbon cycle of the boreal biome, a mosaic of land cover types dominated by forests and peatlands. The effect of warming-induced vapour pressure deficit (VPD) increases on boreal ET remains poorly understood because peatlands are not specifically represented as plant functional types in Earth system models. Here we show that peatland ET increases more than forest ET with increasing VPD using observations from 95 eddy covariance tower sites.

Abstract: 2,431 growing season evapotranspiration site months (May to September; peatlands, 723; forests, 1,708) (eddy covariance), data collected starting 2006 and ending 2015

Supplemental Information Summary: Source data for Figs. 1–4 and Extended Data Figs. 1–3 are provided with the paper. Eddy covariance flux tower data used in this study can be accessed through the AmeriFlux (https://ameriflux.lbl.gov/), FLUXNET (https://fluxnet.fluxdata.org/data/fluxnet2015-dataset/), or European Fluxes Database Cluster (http://www.europe-fluxdata.eu/) webpages (see Supplementary Data). Site data that are not accessible through these webpages (see Supplementary Data) are available from the corresponding author on

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Links: mhelbig85@gmail.com

Research:

Further Info:

Status: Complete

Keywords: vegetation, meteorology, evapotranspiration,

Geographical coordinates: North: 83.15, South: 41.909 East: -52.619 West: -141.010

Bounding Temporal Extent: Start Date: 2006-01-01, End Date: 2015-01-01

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