Vegetation biomass on grasslands increases in response to elevated carbon dioxide levels, but less than expected.
Vegetation biomass on grasslands increases in response to elevated carbon dioxide levels, but less than expected. Vegetation on grasslands with a wet spring season has the greatest increase. This has been demonstrated in a new study published in the scientific journal Nature Plants.
An important, but uncertain, factor in climate research is the extent to which all ecosystems can accumulate carbon from the increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. Areas covered by grass and similar vegetation play a significant role in this context. Worldwide these areas cover 29 per cent of Earth’s ice-free land surface.
“These grasslands have great importance for carbon storage,” says Louise C. Andresen, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg and one of the researchers behind the new research study.
In the study the researchers examined how 19 different land areas that were exposed to varying amounts of precipitation – in Australia, Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland, the United States, China and elsewhere – reacted in field-experiments with elevated carbon dioxide concentrations.
Read more at University of Gothenburg
Image: Experiment with carbon dioxide. (Credit: Photo by Louise C. Andresen.)
