Vegetation structural change since 1981 significantly enhanced the terrestrial carbon sink

Jing M. Chen, Weimin Ju (), Philippe Ciais, Nicolas Viovy, Ronggao Liu, Yang Liu and Xuehe Lu
Additional contact information
Jing M. Chen: University of Toronto
Weimin Ju: Nanjing University
Philippe Ciais: LSCE/IPSL, CEA-CNRS-UVSQ, Universite Paris-Saclay
Nicolas Viovy: LSCE/IPSL, CEA-CNRS-UVSQ, Universite Paris-Saclay
Ronggao Liu: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Yang Liu: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Xuehe Lu: Nanjing University

Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Satellite observations show that leaf area index (LAI) has increased globally since 1981, but the impact of this vegetation structural change on the global terrestrial carbon cycle has not been systematically evaluated. Through process-based diagnostic ecosystem modeling, we find that the increase in LAI alone was responsible for 12.4% of the accumulated terrestrial carbon sink (95 ± 5 Pg C) from 1981 to 2016, whereas other drivers of CO2 fertilization, nitrogen deposition, and climate change (temperature, radiation, and precipitation) contributed to 47.0%, 1.1%, and −28.6% of the sink, respectively. The legacy effects of past changes in these drivers prior to 1981 are responsible for the remaining 65.5% of the accumulated sink from 1981 to 2016. These results refine the attribution of the land sink to the various drivers and would help constrain prognostic models that often have large uncertainties in simulating changes in vegetation and their impacts on the global carbon cycle.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12257-8 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:10:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-019-12257-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-12257-8

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().