Weakening of global terrestrial carbon sequestration capacity under increasing intensity of warm extremes

Weakening of global terrestrial carbon sequestration capacity under increasing intensity of warm extremes | Nature Ecology & Evolution

Abstract

The net ecosystem exchange (NEE), determining terrestrial carbon sequestration capacity, is strongly controlled by climate change and has exhibited substantial year-to-year fluctuations. How the increased frequency and intensity of warm extremes affect NEE variations remains unclear. Here, we combined multiple NEE datasets from atmospheric CO2 inversions, Earth system models, eddy-covariance data-driven methods and climate datasets to show that the terrestrial carbon sequestration capacity is weakened during warm extreme occurrences over the past 40 years, primarily contributed by tropical regions (81% ± 48%). The underlying mechanism can be rooted in the overwhelmingly decreased trend of gross primary productivity compared with terrestrial ecosystem respiration. Additionally, the weakened terrestrial carbon sequestration capacity is mainly driven by the transition from temperature or soil moisture control to vapour pressure deficit control, which is associated with the increasing intensity of warm extremes. Our findings suggest that warm extremes threaten the global carbon sequestration function of terrestrial ecosystems. Therefore, more attention should be given to the evolution of the increasing intensity of warm extremes in future climate projections.

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Data availability

All the data presented in this study are publicly accessible. ERA5 and CRUNCEP climate reanalysis are available from the Research Data Archive at the National Center for Atmospheric Research: https://rda.ucar.edu/. Daily maximum temperature of globally distributed weather stations can be accessed at www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/metadata/landing-page/bin/iso?id=gov.noaa.ncdc…. CAM atmospheric inversion data are available at https://ads.atmosphere.copernicus.eu/datasets/cams-global-greenhouse-ga…. Jena CarboScope atmospheric inversion data can be accessed at www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/CarboScope/s/main.html. The FLUXCOM dataset is available at www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/geodb/projects/Data.php. The globally averaged CO2 dataset is accessible at https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_data.html. NEE simulations from the C4MIP participating in the CMIP6 numerical experiments are available at https://aims2.llnl.gov/search. Daily gridded GPP from MODIS can be accessed at https://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/dsviewer.pl?ds_id=1835. GLEAM daily root-zone soil moisture data are available at www.gleam.eu.

Code availability

The code used for the analysis and mapping is available via GitHub at https://github.com/Yuan0991/Codes.

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Acknowledgements

X.Y. was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 42105118) and the National Youth Talent Project (grant no. 2023000308). X.C. was supported by the Joint CAS-MPG Research Project (grant no. HZXM20225001MI), the Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 4236114487) and the Tianshan Talent Project of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China (grant no. 2022TSYCLJ0056). We are also very grateful to all the authors who released the data involved in this research freely and publicly, including gridded climate reanalysis and carbon flux datasets. Detailed information about these data is specified in the Methods and Data availability section.

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Nature Ecology & Evolution thanks Markus Reichstein, Jakob Zscheischler and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Yuan, X., Chen, X., Ochege, F.U. et al. Weakening of global terrestrial carbon sequestration capacity under increasing intensity of warm extremes. Nat Ecol Evol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02576-5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02576-5