Search

Climate and land-use changes will redistribute fire across the planet. Larger, more frequent, and intense wildfires are projected in extra-tropical regions, while human-driven declines in fire activity are reversed under the highest degrees of warming.

The fraction of C4 plants in terrestrial biomass decreased from 16% to 12% between 1982 and 2016, but the change is too small to explain the observed change in the isotopic composition of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to estimates based on a C3/C4 distribution model and a carbon cycle box model.

Lower CO₂ and more-frequent fires may have supported grassland expansion in the Amazon during the Last Glacial Maximum, according to vegetation modelling using a range of boundary conditions tested against existing pollen records.

Analysis of the FLUXNET2015 dataset provides observational evidence for widespread thermal acclimation of canopy-scale photosynthesis and its timescales across diverse biomes, improving its representation in land surface models.

The sensitivity of the terrestrial biosphere to changes in climate constitutes a feedback mechanism with the potential to accentuate global warming. Process-based modelling experiments now indicate that under a business-as-usual emissions scenario the biosphere on land is expected to be an increasingly positive feedback to anthropogenic climate change, potentially amplifying equilibrium climate sensitivity by 22–27%.

Using systematic satellite observations of land surface temperature and soil moisture during soil dry-downs, the spatially-explicit global distribution of the critical soil moisture threshold of plant water stress and its drivers is uncovered.

This study finds that West African ecosystems are generally more productive than equivalent ecosystems in Amazonia. It also suggests that a semi-deciduous forest site in Ghana is the world’s most productive forest measured to date.

Using trait-based optimality theory that unifies stomatal responses and acclimation of plants to changing environments, this study builds a model of the coupling of CO₂ and water vapour exchanges through the leaves. This successfully predicts the simultaneous decline in carbon assimilation, stomatal conductance and photosynthetic capacity during progressive droughts.

Elevated atmospheric CO₂ has stimulated plant growth, yet the future land carbon sink may be constrained in part by nutrient availability. Here the authors review plant nutrient acquisition strategies and the need for better representation in models to improve predictions of land carbon uptake.

Annual maximum fractional absorbed photosynthetically active radiation, described as smaller of a water-limited value and an energy-limited value, reproduces global spatial and temporal greenness patterns among remote-sensing products, according to simulation of light use efficiency model.

Testing ecophysiological theory using tree traits along a vapour pressure deficit (VPD) gradient shows, as predicted, that photosynthetic capacity is higher at higher VPD sites. Contrary to the predictions, potential water conductivity tends to increase with higher VPD.

The terrestrial biosphere stores carbon in a land carbon sink, offsetting emissions of carbon into the atmosphere. This Review demonstrates that the magnitude of the land carbon sink has increased over time, but that its stability in the future is less clear and depends on climate impacts and effective implementation of nature-based solutions.

By considering differences among herbaceous, deciduous and evergreen plants and how these lead to divergent climatic responses in plant functional traits, the authors have created a comprehensive set of global trait maps.

The centennial-scale climate feedback strength of greenhouse gases is not consistent with the highest and lowest estimates from CMIP models according to feedback strength estimates based on gas concentrations in ice cores during Dansgaard-Oeschger events