Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences

The climate is changing, and forest carbon uptake around the world has responded. Quantifying the magnitude of that response is vital for evaluating and improving representation of ecosystems in climate models. Failing to do so can lead to large inaccuracies in how these models track the fate of future fossil fuel emissions and the response of climate and organisms. While we can naturally observe how forest gross primarily productivity (GPP) responds over the past decades, what is more difficult is teasing out the competing factors of land management, nitrogen deposition, changing climates, and increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide on it.

Zhan et al. [2024] leverage the global eddy covariance flux tower network and develop a robust data-driven approach to isolate the carbon dioxide effect on GPP. After statistically removing the impacts of climate variability and nitrogen deposition on GPP, the researchers found a 16% increase in GPP per 100 parts per million in atmospheric carbon dioxide. This result is in line with the median of a suite of land surface models, though these models show large variation around that. The new result provides a defensible carbon dioxide fertilization benchmark for model evaluation and improvement.

Citation: Zhan, C., Orth, R., Yang, H., Reichstein, M., Zaehle, S., De Kauwe, M. G., et al. (2024). Estimating the CO2 fertilization effect on extratropical forest productivity from flux-tower observations. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 129, e2023JG007910. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JG007910

—Ankur R. Desai, Associate Editor, JGR: Biogeosciences

Text © 2024. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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