Tropical forests and the global carbon cycle: impacts of atmospheric carbon dioxide, climate change and rate of deforestation
Wolfgang Cramer,Alberte Bondeau,Sibyll Schaphoff,Wolfgang Lucht,Benjamin Smith,Stephen Sitch +5 more
TLDR
Estimates of additional carbon emissions during the twenty-first century, for all climate and deforestation scenarios, range from 101 to 367 Gt C, resulting in CO2 concentration increases above background values between 29 and 129 p.p.m.Abstract:
The remaining carbon stocks in wet tropical forests are currently at risk because of anthropogenic deforestation, but also because of the possibility of release driven by climate change. To identify the relative roles of CO2 increase, changing temperature and rainfall, and deforestation in the future, and the magnitude of their impact on atmospheric CO2 concentrations, we have applied a dynamic global vegetation model, using multiple scenarios of tropical deforestation (extrapolated from two estimates of current rates) and multiple scenarios of changing climate (derived from four independent offline general circulation model simulations). Results show that deforestation will probably produce large losses of carbon, despite the uncertainty about the deforestation rates. Some climate models produce additional large fluxes due to increased drought stress caused by rising temperature and decreasing rainfall. One climate model, however, produces an additional carbon sink. Taken together, our estimates of additional carbon emissions during the twenty-first century, for all climate and deforestation scenarios, range from 101 to 367 Gt C, resulting in CO2 concentration increases above background values between 29 and 129 p.p.m. An evaluation of the method indicates that better estimates of tropical carbon sources and sinks require improved assessments of current and future deforestation, and more consistent precipitation scenarios from climate models. Notwithstanding the uncertainties, continued tropical deforestation will most certainly play a very large role in the build-up of future greenhouse gas concentrations.read more
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Towards a worldwide wood economics spectrum
Jérôme Chave,David A. Coomes,Steven Jansen,Simon L. Lewis,Nathan G. Swenson,Amy E. Zanne,Amy E. Zanne +6 more
TL;DR: It is suggested that, similar to the manifold that tree species leaf traits cluster around the 'leaf economics spectrum', a similar 'wood economics spectrum' may be defined.
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Mangrove forests: Resilience, protection from tsunamis, and responses to global climate change
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Modelling the role of agriculture for the 20th century global terrestrial carbon balance
Alberte Bondeau,P. C. Smith,Sönke Zaehle,Sibyll Schaphoff,Wolfgang Lucht,Wolfgang Cramer,Dieter Gerten,Hermann Lotze-Campen,Christoph Müller,Markus Reichstein,Benjamin Smith +10 more
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Evaluation of the terrestrial carbon cycle, future plant geography and climate‐carbon cycle feedbacks using five Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs)
Stephan Sitch,Chris Huntingford,Nicola Gedney,Peter Levy,Mark R. Lomas,Shilong Piao,Richard Betts,P. Ciais,Peter M. Cox,Pierre Friedlingstein,Chris D. Jones,Iain Colin Prentice,F. I. Woodward +12 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors test the ability of five Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs), forced with observed climatology and atmospheric CO2, to model the contemporary global carbon cycle.
Journal ArticleDOI
Increasing carbon storage in intact African tropical forests
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TL;DR: Taxon-specific analyses of African inventory and other data suggest that widespread changes in resource availability, such as increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, may be the cause of the increase in carbon stocks, as some theory and models predict.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
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