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Journal Article

Declining precipitation frequency may drive earlier leaf senescence by intensifying drought stress and enhancing drought acclimation

Authors

Zhang,  Xinyi
External Organizations;

Wang,  Xiaoyue
External Organizations;

Zohner,  Constantin M.
External Organizations;

Peñuelas,  Josep
External Organizations;

Li,  Yang
External Organizations;

Wu,  Xiuchen
External Organizations;

Zhang,  Yao
External Organizations;

Liu,  Huiying
External Organizations;

Shen,  Pengju
External Organizations;

Jia,  Xiaoxu
External Organizations;

Liu,  Wenbin
External Organizations;

Tian,  Dashuan
External Organizations;

/persons/resource/prajal.pradhan

Pradhan,  Prajal
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

Fandohan,  Adandé Belarmain
External Organizations;

Peng,  Dailiang
External Organizations;

Wu,  Chaoyang
External Organizations;

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Fulltext (public)

s41467-025-56159-4.pdf
(Publisher version), 3MB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Zhang, X., Wang, X., Zohner, C. M., Peñuelas, J., Li, Y., Wu, X., Zhang, Y., Liu, H., Shen, P., Jia, X., Liu, W., Tian, D., Pradhan, P., Fandohan, A. B., Peng, D., Wu, C. (2025): Declining precipitation frequency may drive earlier leaf senescence by intensifying drought stress and enhancing drought acclimation. - Nature Communications, 16, 910.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-56159-4


Cite as: https://publications.pik-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_31851
Abstract
Precipitation is an important factor influencing the date of foliar senescence, which in turn affects carbon uptake of terrestrial ecosystems. However, the temporal patterns of precipitation frequency and its impact on foliar senescence date remain largely unknown. Using both long-term carbon flux data and satellite observations across the Northern Hemisphere, we show that, after excluding impacts from of temperature, radiation and total precipitation by partial correlation analysis, declining precipitation frequency may drive earlier foliar senescence date from 1982 to 2022. A decrease in precipitation frequency intensifies drought stress by reducing root-zone soil moisture and increasing atmospheric dryness, and limit the photosynthesis necessary for sustained growth. The enhanced drought acclimation, showing a more rapid response to drought, also explains the positive relationship between precipitation frequency and foliar senescence date. Finally, we find 30 current state-of-art Earth system models largely fail to capture the sensitivity of DFS to changes in precipitation frequency and incorrectly predict the direction of correlations for approximately half of the northern global lands, in both historical simulations and future predictions. Our results therefore highlight the critical need to include precipitation frequency, rather than just total precipitation, into models to accurately forecast plant phenology under future climate change.