Do dead microbes control the future of Earth’s climate? A team of researchers led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) suspects they might. Using new tools, the team can see which soil organisms are thriving and which are dying in California’s changing climate—and what happens to carbon in their cell […]
Drought—even in a single year—can leave aspen more vulnerable to insect infestation and other stressors decades later, a new study by NAU researchers found. Aspen trees that were not resilient to drought stayed smaller than others, growing more slowly and succumbing to an outbreak of insects known as aspen leaf […]
More severe and frequent fires in the Alaskan boreal forest are releasing vast stores of carbon and nitrogen from burned trees and soil into the atmosphere, a trend that could accelerate climate warming. But new research published this week in the journal Science shows that the deciduous trees replacing burned […]
Biological nitrogen (N) fixation plays an important role in terrestrial N cycling and represents a key driver of terrestrial net primary productivity (NPP). Despite the importance of N fixation in terrestrial ecosystems, our knowledge regarding the controls on terrestrial N fixation remains poor. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis (based on […]
In trees, large uncertainties remain in how nonstructural carbohydrates (NSCs) respond to variation in water availability in natural, intact ecosystems. Variation in NSC pools reflects temporal fluctuations in supply and demand, as well as physiological coordination across tree organs in ways that differ across species and NSC fractions (e.g., soluble […]
Boreal wildfires are increasing in intensity, extent, and frequency, potentially intensifying carbon emissions and transitioning the region from a globally significant carbon sink to a source. The productive southern boreal forests of central Canada already experience relatively high frequencies of fire, and as such may serve as an analog of […]
Multiple lines of evidence have demonstrated the persistence of global land carbon (C) sink during the past several decades. However, both annual net ecosystem productivity (NEP) and its inter-annual variation (IAVNEP) keep varying over space. Thus, identifying local indicators for the spatially varying NEP and IAVNEP is critical for locating the […]
Evergreen conifer forests are the most prevalent land cover type in North America. Seasonal changes in the color of evergreen forest canopies have been documented with near-surface remote sensing, but the physiological mechanisms underlying these changes, and the implications for photosynthetic uptake, have not been fully elucidated. Here, we integrate […]
Globally, soils store two to three times as much carbon as currently resides in the atmosphere, and it is critical to understand how soil greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and uptake will respond to ongoing climate change. In particular, the soil-to-atmosphere CO2 flux, commonly though imprecisely termed soil respiration (RS), is […]
We conducted a large-scale, multiple-year study in harvested areas of Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii [Mirbel] Franco) forests in western Washington, examining the effectiveness of control methods on the widespread invasive shrub Scotch broom [Cytisus scoparius (L.) Link]. We tested both chemical and physical control methods, using three different approaches that are […]