Contrasting physiological and structural vegetation feedbacks in climate change simulations

Anthropogenic increases in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are predicted to cause a warming of the global climate by modifying radiative forcing. Carbon dioxide concentration increases may make a further contribution to warming by inducing a physiological response of the global vegetation - a reduced stomatal conductance, which suppresses transpiration. Moreover, a CO₂-enriched atmosphere and the corresponding change in climate may also alter the density of vegetation cover, thus modifying the physical characteristics of the land surface to provide yet another climate feedback. But such feedbacks from changes in vegetation structure have not yet been incorporated into general circulation model predictions of future climate change. Here we use a general circulation model iteratively coupled to an equilibrium vegetation model to quantify the effects of both physiological and structural vegetation feedbacks on a doubled-CO₂ climate. On a global scale, changes in vegetation structure are found to partially offset physiological vegetation-climate feedbacks in the long term, but overall vegetation feedbacks provide significant regional-scale effects.