Net carbon dioxide losses of northern ecosystems in response to autumn warming
By Shilong Piao, Philippe Ciais, Pierre Friedlingstein, P. Peylin, Markus Reichstein, S. Luyssaert, H. Margolis, Jingyun Fang, A. Barr, Anping Chen and 6 more. Nature, 2008
1,176 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The carbon balance of terrestrial ecosystems is particularly sensitive to climatic changes in autumn and spring, with spring and autumn temperatures over northern latitudes having risen by about 1.1 °C and 0.8 °C, respectively, over the past two decades. A simultaneous greening trend has also been observed, characterized by a longer growing season and greater photosynthetic activity. These observations have led to speculation that spring and autumn warming could enhance carbon sequestration and extend the period of net carbon uptake in the future. Here we analyse interannual variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration data and ecosystem carbon dioxide fluxes. We find that atmospheric records from the past 20 years show a trend towards an earlier autumn-to-winter carbon dioxide build-up, suggesting a shorter net carbon uptake period. This trend cannot be explained by changes in atmospheric transport alone and, together with the ecosystem flux data, suggest increasing carbon losses in autumn. We use a process-based terrestrial biosphere model and satellite vegetation greenness index observations to investigate further the observed seasonal response of northern ecosystems to autumnal warming. We find that both photosynthesis and respiration increase during autumn warming, but the increase in respiration is greater. In contrast, warming increases photosynthesis more than respiration in spring. Our simulations and observations indicate that northern terrestrial ecosystems may currently lose carbon dioxide in response to autumn warming, with a sensitivity of about 0.2 PgC °C-1, offsetting 90% of the increased carbon dioxide uptake during spring. If future autumn warming occurs at a faster rate than in spring, the ability of northern ecosystems to sequester carbon may be diminished earlier than previously suggested.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/551b94c7544bb6cb6dc0788d7cf05c978e1271d1
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In Global and Planetary Change
- Philip Harris
- Ram Oren
- M. Ashraf
- Pierre Gentine
- D. Way
- Shilong Piao
- Ivan A. Janssens
- Vincent Humphrey
Citations in the corpus
- The natural fix? The role of ecosystems in climate mitigation: a UNEP rapid response assessment. (2009, background): “Higher autumn respiration rates and resulting soil carbon loss may turn boreal forest areas into carbon sources (Piao et al. 2008).”
- Plant phenology and global climate change: Current progresses and challenges (2019, background): “Because soil carbon decomposition increases concurrently with warming‐enhanced vegetation productivity, an extension of grow‐ ing season length does not necessarily augment ecosystem net car‐ bon uptake, particularly in arctic ecosystems (Piao et al., 2008).”
- Coupling between the terrestrial carbon and water cycles—a review (2019, background): “Several studies suggested that temperature was a dominant factor compared to precipitation at the global scale (Piao et al 2008, Wang et al 2013, Anderegg et al 2015a).”