Consistent Land- and Atmosphere-Based U.S. Carbon Sink Estimates

By S. Pacala, G. Hurtt, D. Baker, P. Peylin, Richard A. Houghton, R. Birdsey, L. Heath, E. Sundquist, R. Stallard, Philippe Ciais and 13 more. Science, 2001

877 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For the period 1980–89, we estimate a carbon sink in the coterminous United States between 0.30 and 0.58 petagrams of carbon per year (petagrams of carbon = 1015 grams of carbon). The net carbon flux from the atmosphere to the land was higher, 0.37 to 0.71 petagrams of carbon per year, because a net flux of 0.07 to 0.13 petagrams of carbon per year was exported by rivers and commerce and returned to the atmosphere elsewhere. These land-based estimates are larger than those from previous studies (0.08 to 0.35 petagrams of carbon per year) because of the inclusion of additional processes and revised estimates of some component fluxes. Although component estimates are uncertain, about one-half of the total is outside the forest sector. We also estimated the sink using atmospheric models and the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (the tracer-transport inversion method). The range of results from the atmosphere-based inversions contains the land-based estimates. Atmosphere- and land-based estimates are thus consistent, within the large ranges of uncertainty for both methods. Atmosphere-based results for 1980–89 are similar to those for 1985–89 and 1990–94, indicating a relatively stable U.S. sink throughout the period.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc99e8c9f5868e687ea51a05856d7e9b7c8aeaea

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Citations in the corpus

Dynamics of Land-Use and Land-Cover Change in Tropical Regions (2003, background): “The expansion of woody shrubs in the western United States grasslands, following fire suppression and overgrazing, contributed to a large carbon sink (14, 53).”
Late-summer carbon fluxes from Canadian forests and peatlands along an east-west continental transect (2006, background): “Other studies have subsequently estimated a smaller North American sink, but they all still suggest that the eastern portion of the continent is an active C sink (Pacala et al. 2001; Gurney et al. 2002).”
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) mission (2004, background): “…estimate fluxes over the southern oceans (Battle et al., 2000; Bousquet et al., 2000; Ciais et al., 1995; Conway and Tans, 1999; Denning et al., 1995; Keeling and Shertz, 1992; Morimoto et al., 2000; Pacala et al., 2001; Tans et al., 1989; Fan et al., 1998; Rayner and O’Brien, 2001; Enting, 1993).”
Plant functional composition influences rates of soil carbon and nitrogen accumulation (2008, background): “Lower plant diversity could potentially weaken the ability of long-lived carbon (C) pools of terrestrial ecosystems to continue to act as C sinks of atmospheric CO 2 (Fan et al. 1998; Pacala et al. 2001).”
WOODY PLANT ESTABLISHMENT AND SPATIAL HETEROGENEITY IN GRASSLANDS (2003, neutral): “907 Key words: competition; grassland; mesquite; Paspalum; Prosopis glandulosa; savanna; Schizachyrium; woody plant encroachment.”
Impacts of shrub encroachment on ecosystem structure and functioning: towards a global synthesis (2011, background): “Currently in the United States, nonforest lands undergoing shrub encroachment are estimated to cover up to 330 million hectares, mostly in the semi-arid western states (Pacala et al. 2001; Knapp et al. 2008).”