Authors
Santonu Goswami, Daniel J Hayes, Peter Kuhry, Gustaf Hugelius, Christina Schaedel, David Olefeldt, Guido Grosse, Guangsheng Chen, Antoni Lewkowicz, Vladimir Romanovsky, Sebastian Zubrzycki, Stephan Gruber, Jorien Vonk, A David McGuire, Edward AG Schuur
Description
High latitude terrestrial ecosystems contain a large amount of soil organic carbon (SOC) in the frozen permafrost and hence are key components in the global carbon cycle. The increased thawing of permafrost due to climate warming, and the resulting microbial decomposition of the permafrost carbon pool is anticipated to be a significant positive feedback on future radiative forcing from terrestrial ecosystems to the Earth’s climate system. Improving understanding of permafrost carbon vulnerability and climate feedbacks is increasingly becoming a research priority. The current approach using permafrost regionalization map (PeRM) is a community effort within a collaborative network ie Vulnerability of Permafrost Carbon Research Coordination Network (RCN) aiming to characterize the northern permafrost domain based on key environmental characteristics among different geographies that we believe are important controls on either current soil organic matter (SOM) quantity or quality or future vulnerability of permafrost carbon. The map (PeRM) was developed based on the circum-arctic permafrost and ground ice condition map by Brown et al.(1997) and circum-arctic vegetation map developed by Walker et al.(2005). The permafrost regions were defined using different parameters including topography, geographical locations (continentality), types of permafrost present, types of biomes and arctic bioclimatic zones and predominant terrain types.