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Terrestrial photosynthesis inferred from plant carbonyl sulfide uptake

Nature volume 634, pages 855–861 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Terrestrial photosynthesis, or gross primary production (GPP), is the largest carbon flux in the biosphere, but its global magnitude and spatiotemporal dynamics remain uncertain1. The global annual mean GPP is historically thought to be around 120 PgC yr−1 (refs. 2,3,4,5,6), which is about 30–50 PgC yr−1 lower than GPP inferred from the oxygen-18 (18O) isotope7 and soil respiration8. This disparity is a source of uncertainty in predicting climate–carbon cycle feedbacks9,10. Here we infer GPP from carbonyl sulfide, an innovative tracer for CO2 diffusion from ambient air to leaf chloroplasts through stomata and mesophyll layers. We demonstrate that explicitly representing mesophyll diffusion is important for accurately quantifying the spatiotemporal dynamics of carbonyl sulfide uptake by plants. From the estimate of carbonyl sulfide uptake by plants, we infer a global contemporary GPP of 157 (±8.5) PgC yr−1, which is consistent with estimates from 18O (150–175 PgC yr−1) and soil respiration (\({149}_{-23}^{+29}\) PgC yr−1), but with an improved confidence level. Our global GPP is higher than satellite optical observation-driven estimates (120–140 PgC yr–1) that are used for Earth system model benchmarking. This difference predominantly occurs in the pan-tropical rainforests and is corroborated by ground measurements11, suggesting a more productive tropics than satellite-based GPP products indicated. As GPP is a primary determinant of terrestrial carbon sinks and may shape climate trajectories9,10, our findings lay a physiological foundation on which the understanding and prediction of carbon–climate feedbacks can be advanced.

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Fig. 1: Comparison of simulated terrestrial ecosystem OCS fluxes with site observations.
Fig. 2: Comparison of FOCS (2000–2010 average) between gmes-implicit and gmes-explicit simulations across PFTs.
Fig. 3: Comparison of GPP inferred from CLM5 OCS simulation with GPP simulated by CLM5 implemented with the default FvCB model.
Fig. 4: Intercomparison of GPP estimates from existing approaches.

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Data availability

The CLM5 simulation output related to this study is available at https://doi.org/10.7298/mxg9-7176.

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Acknowledgements

J.L. acknowledges the Saltonstall Fellowship and Barbara McClintock Award from the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University. Y.S. acknowledges funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Macrosystem Biology (award 1926488). D.L. acknowledges funding from the NSF (number 2039932). Part of this work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). L.K. was supported by NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), USA (ECOSTRESS Science and Applications Team: grant number 80NSSC20K0215). L.G. acknowledges support from the US Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research Program. The funding for L.G. was through the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Terrestrial Ecosystem Sciences Science Focus Area. This manuscript has been co-authored by UT-Battelle under contract number DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US DOE. This work is supported by the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which is a major facility sponsored by the NSF under Cooperative Agreement number 1852977. Specifically, we acknowledge the computing resources made available to Y.S. and J.L., including the Cheyenne and Derecho supercomputers provided by the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) at the NCAR. Y.S., L.K. and J.E.C. acknowledge the 2017 Keck Institute for Space Studies workshop ‘Next-Generation Approach for Detecting Climate-Carbon Feedbacks: Space-Based Integration of Carbonyl Sulfide (OCS), CO2, and Solar Induced Fluorescence (SIF)’. The US government retains — and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication acknowledges that the US government retains — a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this work, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. The US DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Integrative Plant Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Jiameng Lai, Yiqi Luo & Ying Sun

  2. Meteorology and Air Quality, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Linda M. J. Kooijmans

  3. Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, CA, USA

    Wu Sun

  4. Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Danica Lombardozzi

  5. University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    J. Elliott Campbell

  6. Environmental Sciences Division and Climate Change Science Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA

    Lianhong Gu

  7. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Le Kuai

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  1. Jiameng Lai
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Contributions

Y.S. and J.L. conceived of the study. J.L. and Y.S. developed the methodology. J.L. conducted the analyses. J.L. and Y.S. interpreted the results; L.M.J.K., W.S., D.L., J.E.C., L.G., Y.L. and L.K. helped with the interpretation. J.L. and Y.S. constructed the initial draft, and L.M.J.K., W.S., D.L., J.E.C., L.G., Y.L. and L.K. contributed critically to the subsequent revision of manuscript.

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Correspondence to Ying Sun.

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Supplementary Text 1–6, Tables 1–6 and Figs. 1–20 and References.

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Lai, J., Kooijmans, L.M.J., Sun, W. et al. Terrestrial photosynthesis inferred from plant carbonyl sulfide uptake. Nature 634, 855–861 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08050-3

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