Breaking the Ecosystem Balance Over the Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

Abstract Ecosystem imbalance is often associated with a feedback mechanism, which a self‐amplifying or ‐dampening process expressed by a pathway of causal processes that come back to its starting point, establishing a cycle. Warming, which is increasing worldwide due to human activities, influences the structure and functioning of ecosystems, has threatened sustainable regional and global development, especially over the mountain regions. This is because, the climatic condition rapidly changes along elevation gradients, which may amplify or mitigate the effects of climate on ecosystems. Based on it, a reference system and standardized techniques are extremely important to understand the ecosystem imbalance. Because of terrestrial oxygen production (TOP), which is the terrestrial biosphere continually absorbs CO2 and releases O2 resulting through vegetation photosynthesis, is closely related to the exchange of energy, carbon and other ecosystem factors between the atmosphere and the land. Therefore, whether TOP significantly increases indicate that accelerate in ecosystem imbalance over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) is largely unknown. To do so, integrated with characteristics and drivers of TOP, we investigated how TOP changes respond to ecosystem imbalance over the TP. These changes are influenced by related to climatic conditions, plant productivity, soil fertility, and microbial stability, which can establish a positive feedback loop that standardized direct effect is 0.99, 0.73, 0.75, and 0.75. Our findings suggest that ecosystem imbalance will accelerate with rapid TOP increase over the TP by ∼2,100. This study confirms the importance of the ecosystem imbalance under global warming in the future.

Keywords

• Tibetan Plateau
• ecosystem imbalance
• feedbacks
• environmental changes
• risk