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Nitrogen and phosphorus limitations are both key to spatial patterns and temporal trends in primary production. This global analysis indicates that phosphorus limitation on terrestrial primary productivity has become stronger and is increasing more rapidly than nitrogen limitation.

Ecosystems filter environmental variability through internal regulatory mechanisms, resulting in more predictable carbon fluxes than the weather conditions they experience. Here, the authors find that more productive ecosystems exhibit higher temporal complexity in their carbon cycling. This short-term complexity appears to be increasing over time, potentially indicating greater ecosystem responsiveness to environmental stimuli.

Model projections of future climate are highly sensitive to the assumed response of organic matter decomposition to changes in temperature. Incubation experiments on North American soils suggest that the decisive factors lie at the molecular level.

Climate change is inducing widespread shifts in the phenology of terrestrial organisms. This global analysis reveals a growing asymmetry between plant and animal responses, with more pronounced phenological shifts in plants.

Atmospheric deposition of nitrogen can, but does not always, speed up the sequestration of carbon in trees and forest soil. This complexity may arise from the spatial variations in each of the three mechanisms by which nitrogen affects carbon storage.

Three key axes of variation of ecosystem functional changes and their underlying causes are identified from a dataset of surface gas exchange measurements across major terrestrial biomes and climate zones.

Plant growing season increases under a warming climate, but it is not known whether this will alter plant exposure to frost days. Here Liu et al. investigate trends in the Northern Hemisphere over 30 years and find increased exposure to frost days in regions that have longer growing seasons.

To explore how climate warming may affect rice yield, a study used field experiments and three modelling approaches to examine the sensitivity of rice yield to warming. The study predicts that severe rice yield losses are likely to occur without effective crop improvement.

Phosphorus (P) limitation is pervasive in tropical forests. Here the authors analyse the dependence of photosynthesis on leaf N and P in tropical forests, and show that incorporating leaf P constraints in a terrestrial biosphere model enhances its predictive power.

Biogeochemical analysis of a chronosequence of secondary forest succession in lowland Central Africa suggests that calcium becomes an increasingly scarce and potentially limiting resource with stand age and ecosystem calcium storage shifts from soil to woody biomass.

A detailed assessment of the techno-economic potential of enhanced rock weathering on croplands identifies national CO₂ removal potentials, costs and engineering challenges if it were to be scaled up to help meet ambitious global CO₂ removal targets.

Drivers of spatial differences in leaf phenology are not as widely studied as temporal differences. Here the authors show that the spatial variation of leaf unfolding in 8 deciduous tree species in Europe can be explained by local adaptation to long-term mean climate conditions.

Climate change may lead to changes in elevational patterns of vegetation activitities. Here, the authors analyze global remotely sensing data collected during 1982–2015 to investigate the spatio-temporal dynamics of the elevational gradient in vegetation activities.

Increasing variability of net biome production over recent decades may be due to climate change and points to destabilization of the carbon–climate system.

The photosynthetic capacity of forest ecosystems is an important variable in the global carbon cycle. Here, it is shown that older, more diverse forests have less fluctuation between years in photosynthetic capacity.

The relationship between terrestrial carbon sinks and atmospheric modes of variability remains uncertain. Here, the authors show that the coupling of the North Atlantic Oscillation and East-Atlantic patterns explains variations in the European CO₂sink from 1982 to 2012.

Bioavailable nitrogen is increasing due to human activity, rapidly outpacing increases in another essential nutrient, phosphorous. Peñuelas et al.show that this increasing imbalance between these nutrients is likely to significantly affect life and limit carbon storage in this century.

Recent warming has significantly advanced leaf onset in the northern hemisphere. Here, the authors show asymmetric effects of daytime and nighttime temperature change on the timing of leaf onset.

Comparing grassland ecosystem responses of 128 biotic and abiotic variables to geothermal warming, the authors find that short-term (5–8 years) responses are poor predictors of change over the long term (>50 years).

China has pledged to achieve carbon neutrality in 2060. Here the authors find a promising option to abate 1.0 Gt CO₂-eq yr⁻¹ of carbon emissions at a marginal cost of $69 (t CO₂-eq)⁻¹ by retrofitting 222 GW of coal power plants to co-fire with biomass and upgrading to CCS operation across 2836 counties in China.

Based on a global-scale analysis of the leaf elemental composition of tree species, the authors show that shared ancestry is the major factor shaping plant elementomes, thus providing large-scale empirical support for the biogeochemical niche hypothesis.

The impacts of climate change on summer carbon cycling in the northern hemisphere remain poorly resolved. Here the authors use atmospheric CO₂ records from Point Barrow (Alaska) to show that summer CO₂ drawdown is significantly negatively correlated with terrestrial temperature north of 50°N between 1979–2012.

Agriculture has a massive and growing footprint. This study finds that optimizing fertilizer and major crops globally could reduce by 50% needed global cropland, allowing restored vegetation on spared land to sequester carbon.

The northern temperate carbon sink is estimated to increase by 0.64 PgC each year for each increase in atmospheric CO₂ concentrations by 100 ppm, suggests an analysis of data from field experiments at 7 sites constraints.

Combining eddy covariance measurements and satellite observations, the authors identify an optimum air temperature for global vegetation productivity and show that it is consistently lower than the optimum foliar photosynthetic capacity.

Here the concept of climate-change velocity is used to explore whether northward displacement of vegetation will keep pace with temperature under climate change. Remote sensing data suggest it will not, possibly due to resource availability.

COP21 led to a global commitment to decarbonization before 2100 to combat climate change, but leaves the timing and scale of mitigation efforts to individual countries. Here, the authors show that global carbon emissions need to peak within a decade to maintain realistic pathways for achieving the Paris Agreement.

Simulations of historical and future periods of climate change showed that delayed mitigation to limit global warming might reduce the capacity of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and threaten climate stability and food security.

Global responses of crops to warmer temperatures will affect agricultural sustainability. This study of maize, rice, soybean and wheat projects yield reductions of 3–13% under 2 °C warming.

Global patterns and trends in primary production are estimated using remote-sensing-based models. This Perspective outlines ways to ensure that the next generation of model predictions robustly characterizes how this key element of the terrestrial carbon cycle is changing.

Ecosystem response to climate change will vary in amplitude and dynamically, which may not be captured in current experimental design. This Perspective presents experimental design improvements to better predict responses and thus facilitate understanding of future impacts.

Mineable phosphorus reserves are confined to a handful of countries. Reductions in wastage could free up this resource for low-income, food-deficient countries.

The Paris Agreement is based on emission scenarios that move from a sluggish phase-out of fossil fuels to large-scale late-century negative emissions. Alternative pathways of early deployment of negative emission technologies need to be considered to ensure that climate targets are reached safely and sustainably.

Soil microbial activity is accelerated by warming and does not acclimate over periods of at least 50 years. Resulting soil carbon loss is nevertheless temporary because substrate depletion reduces microbial biomass and constrains the influence of microbes over the ecosystem.

Correlations between the maximum and minimum daily temperatures and a vegetation index in the Northern Hemisphere suggest that asymmetric diurnal warming (faster warming of the land surface during the night than during the day) produces several different vegetation and carbon storage effects.

Atmospheric CO₂ concentration measurements at Barrow, Alaska, together with coupled atmospheric transport and terrestrial ecosystem models show a declining spring net primary productivity response to temperature at high latitudes.

The enhanced CO₂ uptake by vegetation in response to powdered rock should be considered in assessing the feasibility of enhanced weathering as a negative emission technology in mitigating climate change, suggest simulations of a land surface model.

Spring leaf unfolding has been occurring earlier in the year because of rising temperatures; however, long-term evidence in the field from 7 European tree species studied in 1,245 sites shows that this early unfolding effect is being reduced in recent years, possibly because the reducing chilling and/or insolation render trees less responsive to warming.

The fertilization effect has the potential to limit the impacts of global warming, but the biosphere is likely to shift into a period in which this effect is saturated.

The use of fossil fuels and fertilizers has increased the amount of biologically reactive nitrogen in the atmosphere over the past century. A meta-analysis suggests that nitrogen deposition typically impedes the decomposition of carbon in forest soils, significantly reducing carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere.

A substantial amount of atmospheric carbon taken up on land is transported laterally from upland terrestrial ecosystems to the ocean. A synthesis of the available literature suggests that human activities have significantly increased soil carbon inputs to inland waters, but have only slightly affected carbon delivery to the open ocean.