New Mexico Geological Society Annual Spring Meeting — Abstracts

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Patterns and trends of New Mexico ecosystem responses to ongoing warming and intensified climate extremes are addressed, highlighting the widespread emergence of historically novel interactive changes to vegetation, soils, water resources, and associated ecosystem services to human societies in New Mexico. Temperature- and moisture-related non-linearities and thresholds occur in numerous vital physical and biological processes of the Earth system (atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere).For example, multiple climate-related thresholds directly affect patterns of vegetation growth, stress, mortality, and reproduction through bio-physical process constraints on photosynthesis, transpiration/water transport, growing season length, etc. – operating at plant, site, and landscape scales. Thus, both chronic and pulsed climate change extremes like hotter droughts can stress and kill vegetation, thereby causing declines in plant productivity and ground cover, as well as trigger contagious non-linear vegetation disturbance processes such as high-severity wildfires, massive insect outbreaks, or accelerated wind erosion and water runoff and erosion (desertification) when bare-soil thresholds are exceeded. Modest directional changes in mean climate conditions can cause large changes in the frequency and magnitude of extreme climate events. As New Mexico’s climate increasingly diverges from historical ranges of variability, previously unseen tipping-point thresholds are being crossed – with historically unprecedented ecosystem changes emerging that are contributing to pervasive re-organization of diverse landscape patterns and processes. Given ongoing and projected future warming-induced aridification, New Mexico landscapes are expected to remain vulnerable to further climate-change-induced ecosystem transformations in coming decades.

References:

1. Allen, Craig D., 2022, Climate change: Ecosystem responses & feedbacks to water resources in New Mexico. Chapter IV, pp. 42-61 in: Dunbar, N.,D., Gutzler, and Phillips, F., (eds.), Climate Change in New Mexico over the Next 50 Years: Impacts on Water Resources. NM Bureau of Geology & Mineral Resources, Bulletin 164, 218 p. https://geoinfo.nmt.edu/publications/monographs/bulletins/164/