Commentary: Carbon Metabolism of the Terrestrial Biosphere: A Multitechnique Approach for Improved Understanding

By J. Canadell, H. Mooney, Dennis D. Baldocchi, Joseph A. Berry, J. Ehleringer, Christopher B. Field, S. T. Gower, David Y. Hollinger, J. Hunt, R. B. Jackson and 6 more. Ecosystems, 2000

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ABSTRACT Understanding terrestrial carbon metabolism is critical because terrestrial ecosystems play a major role in the global carbon cycle. Furthermore, humans have severely disrupted the carbon cycle in ways that will alter the climate system and directly affect terrestrial metabolism. Changes in terrestrial metabolism may well be as important an indicator of global change as the changing temperature signal. Improving our understanding of the carbon cycle at various spatial and temporal scales will require the integration of multiple, complementary and independent methods that are used by different research communities. Tools such as air sampling networks, inverse numerical methods, and satellite data (top-down approaches) allow us to study the strength and location of the global- and continental-scale carbon sources and sinks. Bottom-up studies provide estimates of carbon fluxes at finer spatial scales and examine the mechanisms that control fluxes at the ecosystem, landscape, and regional scales. Bottom-up approaches include comparative and process studies (for example, ecosystem manipulative experiments) that provide the necessary mechanistic information to develop and validate terrestrial biospheric models. An iteration and reiteration of top-down and bottom-up approaches will be necessary to help constrain measurements at various scales. We propose a major international effort to coordinate and lead research programs of global scope of the carbon cycle.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f2898da76c5fb17c165c4bc9711f4e76ffa113c4

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Citations in the corpus

A handbook of protocols for standardised and easy measurement of plant functional traits worldwide (2003, methodology): “In an attempt to bridge the gap between the ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ approaches (see Canadell et al. 2000), scientists from both sides joined a workshop (at Isle sur la Sorgue, France, in October 2000) organised by the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP, project Global Change and…”
Whole ecosystem metabolic pulses following precipitation events (2008, background): “Quantifying ecosystem metabolic responses to environmental changes is a key challenge for understanding the constraints to biologic functioning and the feedbacks of terrestrial systems to atmospheric gas composition and climate variability ( Canadell et al . 2000; Schimel et al . 2001).”
Remote sensing of forest biophysical variables using HyMap imaging spectrometer data (2005, background): “Most of the forests located in the midlatitudes of the Northern Hemisphere act as a carbon sink, however, with considerable spatial and temporal variations and uncertainties (Canadell et al., 2000; Schimel et al., 2000; Valentini et al., 2000).”
Deriving a light use efficiency model from eddy covariance flux data for predicting daily gross primary production across biomes (2007, background): “Predicting the gross primary productivity (GPP) of terrestrial ecosystems has been a major challenge in quantifying the global carbon cycle (Canadell et al., 2000).”
‘Breathing’ of the terrestrial biosphere: lessons learned from a global network of carbon dioxide flux measurement systems (2008, methodology): “From the first principles, carbon fluxes measured by bottomup methods, such as the eddy covariance technique, are not expected to equal those derived from top-down methods, such as the atmospheric inversion modelling, which measure net biome exchange (Canadell et al. 2000; Schulze et al. 2000).”