611
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: not found
      • Article: not found

      Temperature sensitivity of soil carbon decomposition and feedbacks to climate change

      ,
      Nature
      Springer Science and Business Media LLC

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Significantly more carbon is stored in the world's soils--including peatlands, wetlands and permafrost--than is present in the atmosphere. Disagreement exists, however, regarding the effects of climate change on global soil carbon stocks. If carbon stored belowground is transferred to the atmosphere by a warming-induced acceleration of its decomposition, a positive feedback to climate change would occur. Conversely, if increases of plant-derived carbon inputs to soils exceed increases in decomposition, the feedback would be negative. Despite much research, a consensus has not yet emerged on the temperature sensitivity of soil carbon decomposition. Unravelling the feedback effect is particularly difficult, because the diverse soil organic compounds exhibit a wide range of kinetic properties, which determine the intrinsic temperature sensitivity of their decomposition. Moreover, several environmental constraints obscure the intrinsic temperature sensitivity of substrate decomposition, causing lower observed 'apparent' temperature sensitivity, and these constraints may, themselves, be sensitive to climate.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Nature
          Nature
          Springer Science and Business Media LLC
          0028-0836
          1476-4687
          March 2006
          March 2006
          : 440
          : 7081
          : 165-173
          Article
          10.1038/nature04514
          16525463
          73ce6c71-ff3a-4e21-a9f6-cbcda22e3ff3
          © 2006

          http://www.springer.com/tdm

          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article

          Related Documents Log