Climate Change-Induced Forest Ecosystem Functioning and Alteration in Water-Atmosphere-Soil–Plant (WASP) Relationship

This chapter focuses on forest ecosystem responses to increasing temperature and shifting precipitation patterns in different magnitudes, such as distressed plants growth, reduced primary productivity, shifting phenological behaviour, unstable soil, and plant carbon sequestration capacity, increasing defoliations in many plants, altered vegetation composition, increased plant mortality rate, distraught water and energy flux, unbalanced nutrient cycling, higher soil acidification, increased loss of biodiversity and many more ecological functions of the forest. These processes are interconnected, emphasizing the value of understanding observations of plants and soil processes, plant-water relationship, water-atmosphere-soil–plant (WASP) interaction, and exclusively the connections among them as part of an enhanced understanding of how forest ecosystems will respond to climate change. In discussing the furthermost expected effects of climate change on the biogeochemical processes in forest soils, it is significant to consider the association among the four compartments of forest ecosystems: the water, the atmosphere, the soil, and the plants (WASP system). However, modification in any of these compartments will influence the others, conferring to the entire transfer of mass and energy and mean residence times established among compartments. We observe that increasing temperatures can stimulate water stress, shifting phenology, and forest species composition, all driving the mean residence time of canopy foliage. The grade of retention of foliage, in turn, influences the nutrient cycles in vegetation and the allocation of nutrients from the canopy to the soil. Notwithstanding constant uncertainty about climate change and forest ecosystem trajectories under global change, our review focuses on the comprehensible form of forest ecological change across WASP systems.