Journal ArticleDOI
Do global change experiments overestimate impacts on terrestrial ecosystems
TLDR
There might be a general trend for the magnitude of the responses to decline with higher-order interactions, longer time periods and larger spatial scales, which means that on average, both positive and negative global change impacts on the biosphere might be dampened more than previously assumed.Abstract:
In recent decades, many climate manipulation experiments have investigated biosphere responses to global change. These experiments typically examined effects of elevated atmospheric CO 2 , warming or drought (driver variables) on ecosystem processes such as the carbon and water cycle (response variables). Because experiments are inevitably constrained in the number of driver variables tested simultaneously, as well as in time and space, a key question is how results are scaled up to predict net ecosystem responses. In this review, we argue that there might be a general trend for the magnitude of the responses to decline with higher-order interactions, longer time periods and larger spatial scales. This means that on average, both positive and negative global change impacts on the biosphere might be dampened more than previously assumed.read more
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Book ChapterDOI
Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles
Philippe Ciais,Christopher L. Sabine,Govindasamy Bala,Laurent Bopp,Victor Brovkin,Josep G. Canadell,Abha Chhabra,Ruth DeFries,James N. Galloway,Martin Heimann,Chris D. Jones,C. Le Quéré,Ranga B. Myneni,S. L. Piao,Peter E. Thornton +14 more
TL;DR: For base year 2010, anthropogenic activities created ~210 (190 to 230) TgN of reactive nitrogen Nr from N2 as discussed by the authors, which is at least 2 times larger than the rate of natural terrestrial creation of ~58 Tg N (50 to 100 Tg nr yr−1) (Table 6.9, Section 1a).
Journal ArticleDOI
Nitrous oxide emissions from soils: how well do we understand the processes and their controls?
Klaus Butterbach-Bahl,Elizabeth M. Baggs,Michael Dannenmann,Ralf Kiese,Sophie Zechmeister-Boltenstern +4 more
TL;DR: Improved process understanding, building on the increased use of isotope tracing techniques and metagenomics, needs to go along with improvements in measurement techniques for N2O (and N2) emission in order to obtain robust field and laboratory datasets for different ecosystem types.
Journal ArticleDOI
On underestimation of global vulnerability to tree mortality and forest die‐off from hotter drought in the Anthropocene
TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify ten contrasting perspectives that shape the vulnerability debate but have not been discussed collectively and present a set of global vulnerability drivers that are known with high confidence: (1) droughts eventually occur everywhere; (2) warming produces hotter Droughts; (3) atmospheric moisture demand increases nonlinearly with temperature during drought; (4) mortality can occur faster in hotter Drought, consistent with fundamental physiology; (5) shorter Drought can become lethal under warming, increasing the frequency of lethal Drought; and (6) mortality happens rapidly
Journal ArticleDOI
Plant phenology and global climate change: Current progresses and challenges
Shilong Piao,Shilong Piao,Qiang Liu,Anping Chen,Ivan A. Janssens,Yongshuo H. Fu,Yongshuo H. Fu,Junhu Dai,Lingli Liu,Xu Lian,Miaogen Shen,Xiaolin Zhu +11 more
TL;DR: It is suggested that future studies should primarily focus on using new observation tools to improve the understanding of tropical plant phenology, on improving process-based phenology modeling, and on the scaling of phenology from species to landscape-level.
Journal ArticleDOI
Paradigm shift in plant growth control
TL;DR: This work suggests that in most cases, poorly understood processes of tissue formation and cell growth are governing carbon demand, and thus, CO2 uptake, and that this view is not reflecting reality, but emerged from the availability of methods and process understanding at leaf level.
References
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