Periconnection: Neighborhood and directional eco-effects newly realized
between ecosystem productivity and snow phenology
Abstract
How snow phenology (SP) regulates ecosystem productivity (EP),
especially for those lower- and higher-EP ecosystems, is a point of
interest for understanding of climate-biosphere interactions but has
been an open macroecological question. We were further curious about its
premise – must this eco-effect be caused by the SP in the same site
exclusively? To handle these puzzles, we creatively proposed a new
concept of “periconnection”, following the way of defining
“teleconnection” but also expandingly probing the possible connections
to neighborhoods, for reflecting the ecological links between EP and the
SP of the same and neighboring sites. Analyzing two piled-up datasets of
vegetation dynamics (1999–2013) and SP (2001–2014) in the Northern
Hemisphere (>45°N), we found that the lower- and higher-EP
ecosystems showed weaker tendencies of EP increasing than the average
one for all of the ecosystems; the Arctic circumpolar EP was more
sensitive to the snow-onset than -end SP; the EP variations of the
ecosystems, including those of the lower- and higher-EP ones, were
driven more by the SP around – termed as neighborhood eco-effect;
further, such drivings occurred more to north in North America while
more to south in North Eurasia – as directional eco-effect. Overall,
the novel “periconnection” concept is of fundamental implications for
advancing the progress of many fields ranging from ecology to Earth
interactions.