Warming accelerates decomposition of decades-old carbon in forest soils

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Soil warming and carbon-cycle feedbacks to the climate system.

J. M. Melillo (2002)

In a decade-long soil warming experiment in a mid-latitude hardwood forest, we documented changes in soil carbon and nitrogen cycling in order to investigate the consequences of these changes for the climate system. Here we show that whereas soil warming accelerates soil organic matter decay and carbon dioxide fluxes to the atmosphere, this response is small and short-lived for a mid-latitude forest, because of the limited size of the labile soil carbon pool. We also show that warming increases the availability of mineral nitrogen to plants. Because plant growth in many mid-latitude forests is nitrogen-limited, warming has the potential to indirectly stimulate enough carbon storage in plants to at least compensate for the carbon losses from soils. Our results challenge assumptions made in some climate models that lead to projections of large long-term releases of soil carbon in response to warming of forest ecosystems.

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Temperature and soil organic matter decomposition rates - synthesis of current knowledge and a way forward

Richard T Conant, Michael G Ryan, Göran I Agren … (2012)

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Forest response to elevated CO2 is conserved across a broad range of productivity.

Richard Norby, Evan Delucia, Birgit Gielen … (2005)

Climate change predictions derived from coupled carbon-climate models are highly dependent on assumptions about feedbacks between the biosphere and atmosphere. One critical feedback occurs if C uptake by the biosphere increases in response to the fossil-fuel driven increase in atmospheric [CO(2)] ("CO(2) fertilization"), thereby slowing the rate of increase in atmospheric [CO(2)]. Carbon exchanges between the terrestrial biosphere and atmosphere are often first represented in models as net primary productivity (NPP). However, the contribution of CO(2) fertilization to the future global C cycle has been uncertain, especially in forest ecosystems that dominate global NPP, and models that include a feedback between terrestrial biosphere metabolism and atmospheric [CO(2)] are poorly constrained by experimental evidence. We analyzed the response of NPP to elevated CO(2) ( approximately 550 ppm) in four free-air CO(2) enrichment experiments in forest stands. We show that the response of forest NPP to elevated [CO(2)] is highly conserved across a broad range of productivity, with a stimulation at the median of 23 +/- 2%. At low leaf area indices, a large portion of the response was attributable to increased light absorption, but as leaf area indices increased, the response to elevated [CO(2)] was wholly caused by increased light-use efficiency. The surprising consistency of response across diverse sites provides a benchmark to evaluate predictions of ecosystem and global models and allows us now to focus on unresolved questions about carbon partitioning and retention, and spatial variation in NPP response caused by availability of other growth limiting resources.