Authors
Thomas W Crowther, Katherine EO Todd-Brown, Clara W Rowe, William R Wieder, Joanna C Carey, Megan B Machmuller, BL Snoek, Shibo Fang, Guangsheng Zhou, Steven D Allison, John M Blair, Scott D Bridgham, Andrew J Burton, Yolima Carrillo, Peter B Reich, James S Clark, Aimée T Classen, Feike A Dijkstra, Bo Elberling, Bridget A Emmett, Marc Estiarte, Serita D Frey, Jixun Guo, John Harte, Lifen Jiang, Bart R Johnson, György Kröel-Dulay, Klaus S Larsen, Hjalmar Laudon, Jocelyn M Lavallee, Yiqi Luo, Massimo Lupascu, LN Ma, Sven Marhan, Anders Michelsen, J Mohan, Shuli Niu, Elise Pendall, Josep Penuelas, Laurel Pfeifer-Meister, Christian Poll, Sabine Reinsch, Lorien L Reynolds, Inger K Schmidt, S Sistla, Noah W Sokol, Pamela H Templer, Kathleen K Treseder, Jeffrey M Welker, Mark A Bradford
Publication date
2016/12/1
Journal
Nature
Volume
540
Issue
7631
Pages
104-108
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group UK
Description
The majority of the Earth’s terrestrial carbon is stored in the soil. If anthropogenic warming stimulates the loss of this carbon to the atmosphere, it could drive further planetary warming,,,. Despite evidence that warming enhances carbon fluxes to and from the soil,, the net global balance between these responses remains uncertain. Here we present a comprehensive analysis of warming-induced changes in soil carbon stocks by assembling data from 49 field experiments located across North America, Europe and Asia. We find that the effects of warming are contingent on the size of the initial soil carbon stock, with considerable losses occurring in high-latitude areas. By extrapolating this empirical relationship to the global scale, we provide estimates of soil carbon sensitivity to warming that may help to constrain Earth system model projections. Our empirical relationship suggests that global soil carbon stocks in the …
Scholar articles
TW Crowther, KEO Todd-Brown, CW Rowe… - Nature, 2016