Contribution of morphometric and climatic factors to the variability of geosystems functioning in the Northern taiga of Western Siberia

The paper presents the results of a study on the stability of the functioning of northern taiga landscapes in the northern West Siberian Plain within the Nadym River basin under modern climate warming. We compared the types of dependence between the spatial variation in annual increments of cedar (Pinus sibirica) during the 20th‒21st centuries and characteristics of frost mounds landscape units. We supposed that the correlation ratio and the types of dependence could change in line with the variation of climatic factors. 512 core samples from 39 facies were collected on the tops and slopes of frost mounds. The principal component analysis was applied to reduce the dimensionality of landscape attributes of the frost mounds. We calculated Spearman’s correlations between order parameters and increments for each year from 1926 to 2013. We tested the hypotheses that the spatial variation in increments depend on the morphological parameters of frost mounds and their facies structure, as well as that the intrasecular variability of temperatures and precipitation affect the relationship between landscape characteristics and the increments of cedar. It was found that cedar stands exhibit variable sensitivity to the morphological parameters of frost mounds, which is expressed in significant variations of the correlation sign and value. In years with particularly high or low air temperatures or precipitation, a uniform landscape mode of phytoproductive functioning splits into different variants depending on the morphological properties of landscape units. In cold periods, large frost mounds with higher-lying permafrost and milder microrelief are distinguished by increased phyto-productivity. In warm periods the increased increments are characteristic of small mounds with thicker seasonally thawed layer. The phytoproduction function is more stable in the units with deeper-lying permafrost. Under modern warming, the increments increase only on the relatively stable frost mounds with milder microrelief. The obtained results proved that a fine-scale approach to studying the response of urochishche landscape units to climate change provides the opportunity to clarify the specifics of phytoproduction process, which cannot be revealed without using the landscape approach.

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