Unveiling the buffering impacts of temperate forests on enhancing grain yields through regional biogeophysical climate modification

Abstract

Temperate forests exert significant biogeophysical influences on local and regional climates through modulating the energy and moisture exchanges between the land surface and the atmosphere, thereby serving as crucial barriers with significant buffering impacts on the productivity of adjacent agricultural ecosystems. However, the extent and underlying mechanisms of these biogeophysical and buffering effects of temperate forest barriers remains insufficiently understood. In this study, we integrated the dynamic crop model Noah-MP-Crop with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to investigate the biogeophysical climate regulation of temperate forests and its buffering effects on crop yields in adjacent agricultural lands across Northeast China. Our findings revealed that temperate forest barriers induced significant local climate effects by cooling air and surface temperatures and reducing wind speeds within forested areas during the growing season, while also regulating non-local climate, particularly by altering regional precipitation patterns, 2 m water vapor mixing ratio (Q2), and soil moisture, predominantly in adjacent cropland areas. Furthermore, these forest barriers were found to modulate climate extremes, through affecting maximum temperature and wind speed on a local scale, as well as both maximum and minimum Q2 in non-local croplands. Our study also observed that temperate forest barriers, through biogeophysical climate regulation, enhanced GPP, NPP, and grain yields across most cropland areas. This productivity boost was especially pronounced, with yield increases up to 20 % in certain regions during the extreme drought conditions of 2017, underscoring the critical role of temperate forest barriers in sustaining and enhancing crop yields under severe climatic stress. Our findings underscore the significant buffering effects of temperate forest barriers on regional agricultural production, having important implications for climate adaptation strategies aimed at bolstering agricultural resilience in the face of increasing climate variability and extremes.

Keywords

Temperate forests / Regional climate / Buffering impact / Grain yields / WRF model / Extreme drought

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Lingxue Yu: Methodology, Writing – original draft, Conceptualization. Zhuoran Yan: Writing – original draft, Data curation, Methodology. Tingxiang Liu: Methodology, Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing. Xuan Li: . Jiaxuan Li: Visualization, Data curation. Kun Bu: Methodology, Resources. Wen J. Wang: Resources, Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The numerical calculations in this study were carried out on the ORISE Supercomputer. This study was supported by National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2024YFD1501600), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 42071025, 42371075), and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. 2023240).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2025.100332.

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