Campus change to fight climate change
Stephen Porder from Brown University will talk about how to move universities off of fossil fuels.
Stephen Porder from Brown University will talk about how to move universities off of fossil fuels.
If the fate of carbon is a test that planet Earth is taking right now, one of the answer keys is likely to be found in soil, where microorganisms—which account for nearly 15 percent of global biomass, by some estimates—eat, store and respire carbon and other nutrients. As Earth warms, […]
Plant functional traits can be used to predict ecosystem responses to climate gradients, yet precipitation explains very little variation for most traits. Soil water availability directly influences plant water uptake and thus may assist with the improvement of plant trait–water relationships. However, this promise remains poorly realized due to rare […]
Direct quantification of terrestrial biosphere responses to global change is crucial for projections of future climate change in Earth system models. Here, we synthesized ecosystem carbon-cycling data from 1,119 experiments performed over the past four decades concerning changes in temperature, precipitation, CO2 and nitrogen across major terrestrial vegetation types of […]
Clarifying how increased atmospheric CO2 concentration (eCO2) contributes to accelerated land carbon sequestration remains important since this process is the largest negative feedback in the coupled carbon–climate system. Here, we constrain the sensitivity of the terrestrial carbon sink to eCO2 over the temperate Northern Hemisphere for the past five decades, […]
Accurate prediction of community responses to global change drivers (GCDs) is critical given the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem services. There is consensus that human activities are driving species extinctions at the global scale, but debate remains over whether GCDs are systematically altering local communities worldwide. Across 105 experiments that […]
Fire is a primary disturbance in boreal forests and generates both positive and negative climate forcings. The influence of fire on surface albedo is a predominantly negative forcing in boreal forests, and one of the strongest overall, due to increased snow exposure in the winter and spring months. Albedo forcings […]
Chinese milk vetch (Astragalus sinicus L., vetch), a leguminous winter cover crop, has been widely adopted by farmers in southern China to boost yield of the succeeding rice crop. However, the effects of vetch on rice grain yield and nitrogen (N) use efficiency have not yet been well studied in […]
How do antecedent (past) conditions influence land-carbon dynamics after those conditions no longer persist? In particular, quantifying such memory effects associated with the influence of past environmental (exogenous) and biological (endogenous) conditions is crucial for understanding and predicting the carbon cycle. Here we show, using data from 42 eddy covariance […]
Organic matter input to soils can accelerate the decomposition of native soil carbon (C), a process called the priming effect. Priming is ubiquitous and exhibits some consistent patterns, but a general explanation remains elusive, in part because of variation in the response across different ecosystems, and because of a diversity […]