As the world heats up due to climate change, how much can we continue to depend on plants and soils to help alleviate some of our self-inflicted damage by removing carbon pollution from the atmosphere?
As the world heats up due to climate change, how much can we continue to depend on plants and soils to help alleviate some of our self-inflicted damage by removing carbon pollution from the atmosphere?
New work led by Carnegie’s Wu Sun and Anna Michalak tackles this key question by deploying a bold new approach for inferring the temperature sensitivity of ecosystem respiration—which represents one side of the equation balancing carbon dioxide uptake and carbon dioxide output in terrestrial environments. Their findings are published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
“Right now, plants in the terrestrial biosphere perform a ‘free service’ to us, by taking between a quarter and a third of humanity’s carbon emissions out of the atmosphere,” Michalak explained. “As the world warms, will they be able to keep up this rate of carbon dioxide removal? Answering this is critical for understanding the future of our climate and devising sound climate mitigation and adaptation strategies.”
Read more at: Carnegie Institute for Science
Image of a monitoring station tower in Shenandoah National Park. (Photo Credit: NOAA)
