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The dominant driver of variations in global land carbon sink remains unclear. Here the authors show that the seasonal compensation of temperature effects on land carbon sink in the Northern Hemisphere could induce a global water dominance.

The sensitivity of terrestrial net ecosystem carbon exchange (NEE) to climate remains a major source of uncertainty. Here, the authors identify a precipitation threshold of between 750-950 mm yr⁻¹ for the contiguous United States, beyond which NEE is regulated by respiration rather than production.

How the carbon stocks of the Arctic–Boreal Zone change with warming is not well understood. Here the authors show that wildfires and large regional differences in net carbon fluxes offset the overall increasing CO₂ uptake.

The future of carbon dynamics in the northern high latitudes is uncertain yet represents an important potential feedback under climate change. This study uses a comprehensive observational dataset to show an increasing carbon sink in non-permafrost systems; in permafrost systems uptake was offset by loss.

Peatlands have historically acted as a carbon sink, but it is unclear how climate warming will affect this. The response of peatland carbon uptake to warming depends on the timing of summer warming; early warming leads to increased CO₂ uptake and later warming to decreased uptake.

A global analysis reveals regional trends of net forest ageing but also that widespread stand-replacing disturbances, such as fire and harvest, are driving declining forest age in many areas, often accompanied by substantial losses in aboveground carbon stocks and shifts in carbon sink dynamics.

Northern peatland carbon sink plays a vital role in climate regulation. Here, the authors show that wildfire reduced peatland carbon uptake and enhanced emissions from degraded peatlands; climate change impacts accelerated carbon losses where increased burn rate and severity reduced carbon sink.

A study of how temperature and water availability fluctuations affect the carbon balance of land ecosystems reveals different controls on local and global scales, implying that spatial climate covariation drives the global carbon cycle response.

Droughts can lead to large-scale decline in net CO₂ uptake and increased water-use efficiency by plants, according to global analyses of atmospheric carbon isotope data from 2001 to 2011. This suggests that current climate models may underestimate carbon–drought feedbacks.

The climate impact of water-table drawdown in peatlands is unclear as carbon dioxide emissions increase and methane emissions decrease due to drying. This study shows decreasing water-table depth results in net greenhouse gas emissions from global peatlands, despite reducing methane emissions.

Forest carbon source and sink processes may have contrasting climatic sensitivities. This analysis on 177 coniferous forest sites shows that carbon fluxes and wood formation are coupled but not fully synchronous at intra-annual scales, with peaks in cambial activity preceding those in photosynthesis and respiration.

Heat and moisture stress can reduce carbon uptake by forests. Here, the authors quantify this effect for the extreme 2022 European summer drought. The widespread reduction of photosynthesis exceeded the large local carbon release by intense fires.

Global in situ observations show greenhouse gas emissions from wetlands are lowest when the water table is near the surface, and therefore rewetting wetlands could substantially reduce future emissions.

Future changes in non-growing season conditions, particularly irradiance and temperature, will enhance carbon emissions from a northern peatland, according to projections with a data-driven machine learning model.

The northern high latitude permafrost region has been an important contributor to the carbon sink since the 1980s. A new study finds that as tree cover increases, respiratory CO2 loss during late-growing season offsets photosynthetic CO2 uptake and leads to a slower rate of increasing annual net CO2 uptake.

Earth system model simulations illustrate that agricultural nitrogen fertilization significantly enhances the amplitude of land-atmosphere CO₂ exchange, with a magnitude comparable to that of CO₂ fertilization.

Long-term continuous greenhouse gas measurements in alfalfa cropland showed that the magnitude of the carbon sink was significantly offset by large nitrous oxide (N₂O) emission events following irrigation and rainfall.

The tundra carbon balance is sensitive to small temperature increases at low light, but the effect is offset by increases in leaf area index, or reversed at high light. With warming, greater vegetation cover could negatively affect net carbon uptake.

Land biosphere uptake of carbon is important in mitigating the anthropogenic increase in atmospheric CO₂and its climate forcing. Here, the authors show that land biosphere uptake of carbon in Asia has increased substantially since the mid 1990s, likely owing to reforestation and regional climate change.

The unusually large land carbon sink reported in 2011 can mostly be attributed to semi-arid vegetation growth in the Southern Hemisphere following increased rainfall and long-term greening trends.

Microbes drive the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. Here, Li et al. present a framework for integrating genome-inferred microbial kinetic traits into ecosystem mechanistic models, and use it to benchmark predictions against observed greenhouse gas emissions at an Arctic wetland.

The product of slope and precipitation, along with hillslope aspects, are the main physical factors responsible for landslides in the easternmost Himalayas, according to an interpretable superposable neural network model.

The growth rate of global atmospheric CO₂ concentration is faster in drier years, independently of temperature; this relationship is underestimated in current carbon cycle models.

The authors use experimental and modelling approaches to understand the response of microbial photosynthesis to peatland warming. They show that warming amplifies microbial photosynthesis, which could offset rising CO₂ emissions from northern peatlands by 6.0–13.7% in 2100 (SSP 2-4.5–SSP 5-8.5).

Warmer spring temperatures affect the timing of stem diameter growth of temperate deciduous trees but have little effect on annual growth.

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.

The ongoing disproportionate increases in temperature and precipitation in the Alaska may alter the latitudinal gradients in greenup and snowmelt timings as well as carbon dynamics. With a broad range of datasets and model results, the authors show that the carbon response to early greenup or delayed snowmelt varies greatly depending upon local climatic limits.

Halving average drainage depths in agricultural peatlands could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 1 per cent of all anthropogenic emissions.

Records show that tropical water availability rather than temperature appears to have been increasingly controlling the interannual variability of the terrestrial carbon cycle over the past 59 years.

Here the authors identify hotspots for wetland carbon uptake and regions where wetland carbon sinks are most susceptible to hydrological shifts. They show that two decades of improved carbon sinks in northern mid- to high-latitude wetlands are offset by declining efficiencies elsewhere.

Global soil respiration is rising, probably in response to environmental changes, suggesting that climate-driven losses of soil carbon are occurring worldwide.

Using global flux tower observations, the authors show that atmospheric dryness always reduces photosynthesis, whereas soil dryness can increase photosynthesis if soil water stores are sufficient.

Soil carbon preservation can be enhanced under future climate change by including short duration ley grasslands into crop rotations and adjusting ploughing and ley sowing frequency over continuous grassland, according to process-based modelling and long-term field experiments in western France.

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.

The characteristics of the global mean temperature response to bioenergy production systems is explored under different assumptions and emissions scenarios in the context of the 2 °C target.