Hydro-climatic changes of wetlandscapes across the world
Imenne Åhlén, Guillaume Vigouroux, Georgia Destouni, Jan Pietroń, Navid Ghajarnia, Jesús A. Anaya, Juan F. Blanco, Sonia Borja, Sergey Chalov, Kwok Pan Chun, Nicola Clerici, Amanda Desormeaux, Pierre Girard, O. V. Gorelits, Amy T. Hansen, Fernando Jaramillo, Zahra Kalantari, Adnane Labbaci, Lucia Licero-Villanueva, John Livsey, Giorgos Maneas, Kathryn Pisarello, D. Moshir Pahani, Sebastián Palomino‐Ángel, René M. Price, Constanza Ricaurte‐Villota, Luisa Fernanda Ricaurte, Víctor H. Rivera‐Monroy, Alejandro Rodriguez, Erasmo Rodríguez, Jorge Salgado, B. Sannel, Samaneh Seifollahi‐Aghmiuni, Marc Simard, Ylva Sjöberg, Павел Терский, Josefin Thorslund, David Zamora, Jerker Jarsjö
Abstract
Assessments of ecosystem service and function losses of wetlandscapes (i.e., wetlands and their hydrological catchments) suffer from knowledge gaps regarding impacts of ongoing hydro-climatic change. This study investigates hydro-climatic changes during 1976-2015 in 25 wetlandscapes distributed across the world's tropical, arid, temperate and cold climate zones. Results show that the wetlandscapes were subject to precipitation (P) and temperature (T) changes consistent with mean changes over the world's land area. However, arid and cold wetlandscapes experienced higher T increases than their respective climate zone. Also, average P decreased in arid and cold wetlandscapes, contrarily to P of arid and cold climate zones, suggesting that these wetlandscapes are located in regions of elevated climate pressures. For most wetlandscapes with available runoff (R) data, the decreases were larger in R than in P, which was attributed to aggravation of climate change impacts by enhanced evapotranspiration losses, e.g. caused by land-use changes.