Contribution of permafrost soils to the global carbon budget
By S. Schaphoff, U. Heyder, S. Ostberg, Dieter Gerten, Jens Heinke, Wolfgang Lucht. 2013
215 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Climate warming affects permafrost soil carbon pools in two opposing ways: enhanced vegetation growth leads to higher carbon inputs to the soil, whereas permafrost melting accelerates decomposition and hence carbon release. Here, we study the spatial and temporal dynamics of these two processes under scenarios of climate change and evaluate their influence on the carbon balance of the permafrost zone. We use the dynamic global vegetation model LPJmL, which simulates plant physiological and ecological processes and includes a newly developed discrete layer energy balance permafrost module and a vertical carbon distribution within the soil layer. The model is able to reproduce the interactions between vegetation and soil carbon dynamics as well as to simulate dynamic permafrost changes resulting from changes in the climate. We find that vegetation responds more rapidly to warming of the permafrost zone than soil carbon pools due to long time lags in permafrost thawing, and that the initial simulated net uptake of carbon may continue for some decades of warming. However, once the turning point is reached, if carbon release exceeds uptake, carbon is lost irreversibly from the system and cannot be compensated for by increasing vegetation carbon input. Our analysis highlights the importance of including dynamic vegetation and long-term responses into analyses of permafrost zone carbon budgets.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Ecology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a0728108a37fad7f5f6efca55433afe59aa2525e
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Atmospheric Science
- Jeroen C. J. H. Aerts
- Kevin M. Schaefer
- Ron Witt
- Yoshihide Wada
- Hannes Müller Schmied
- Vladimir E. Romanovsky
- Hugues Lantuit
- Yoshimitsu Masaki
In Ecology
Citations in the corpus
- The impact of the permafrost carbon feedback on global climate (2014, background): “We may be committed to long-term CO2 and CH4 emissions from thawing permafrost that will influence the climate system for centuries (Schaefer et al 2011, Burke et al 2012, Schaphoff et al 2013, Schuur et al 2013).”
- Human impact parameterizations in global hydrological models improve estimates of monthly discharges and hydrological extremes: a multi-model validation study (2018, methodology): “…(0.5◦ × 0.5◦ spatial resolution) for the period 1971–2010 from five GHMs: H08 (Hanasaki et al 2008a, 2008b), LPJmL (Bondeau et al 2007, Rost et al 2008, Schaphoff et al 2013), MATSIRO (Pokhrel et al 2012, 2015, Takata et al 2003), PCR-GLOBWB (van Beek et al 2011, Wada et al 2011, 2014b) and…”