Abstract
Field observations provide direct evidence of how does carbon cycling in permafrost ecosystems respond to climate change. This study provides a comprehensive dataset on the impact of warming on carbon cycling and greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes in permafrost ecosystems. The dataset is extracted and integrated from 132 peer-reviewed studies with 1430 paired observations across eight major permafrost ecosystems, including Arctic and subarctic tundra and wetland, and alpine meadow, steppe, tundra and wetland. This dataset includes 17 variables from experiments conducted during the growing season, covering the plant and soil carbon pools, soil nitrogen pool, and GHG (i.e., CO2, CH4, and N2O) fluxes, among others. Background information on site climate conditions, vegetation and soil characteristics, and details of the warming experiments, including timing, methods, and warming magnitude, are also contained in the dataset. This dataset facilitates a comprehensive understanding of the impact of warming on carbon cycling and GHG fluxes in permafrost ecosystems, and provides supports for meta-analyses and literature reviews, remote sensing data validation, and land model development and parameterization.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
All data supporting this Data Descriptor are openly available on figshare https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.2931208732.
Code availability
The dataset and related code are available on the figshare repository32. For any inquiries regarding code understanding or data usage, users can contact the corresponding author.
References
Obu, J. How much of the earth’s surface is underlain by permafrost? J. Geophys. Res. Earth Surf. 126, e2021JF006123 (2021).
Mishra, U. et al. Spatial heterogeneity and environmental predictors of permafrost region soil organic carbon stocks. Sci. Adv. 7, eaaz5236 (2021).
Biskaborn, B. K. et al. Permafrost is warming at a global scale. Nat. Commun. 10, 264 (2019).
Zhu, X., Jia, G. & Xu, X. Accelerated rise in wildfire carbon emissions from Arctic continuous permafrost. Sci. Bull. (2024).
Elevation-dependent warming in mountain regions of the world. Nat. Clim. Chang. 5, 424–430 (2015).
Chadburn, S. et al. An observation-based constraint on permafrost loss as a function of global warming. Nat. Clim. Chang. 7, 340–344 (2017).
Schuur, E. A. et al. Permafrost and climate change: carbon cycle feedbacks from the warming Arctic. Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 47, 343–371 (2022).
Turetsky, M. R. et al. Carbon release through abrupt permafrost thaw. Nat. Geosci. 13, 138–143 (2020).
Schuur, E. A. et al. Climate change and the permafrost carbon feedback. Nature 520, 171–179 (2015).
Schaefer, K., Lantuit, H., Romanovsky, V. E., Schuur, E. A. & Witt, R. The impact of the permafrost carbon feedback on global climate. Environ. Res. Lett. 9, 085003 (2014).
Bao, T., Jia, G. & Xu, X. Weakening greenhouse gas sink of pristine wetlands under warming. Nat. Clim. Chang. 13, 462–469 (2023).
Lenton, T. M. et al. Climate tipping points—too risky to bet against. Nature 575, 592–595 (2019).
Jones, M. C. et al. Past permafrost dynamics can inform future permafrost carbon–climate feedbacks. Commun. Earth Environ. 4, 272 (2023).
Welshofer, K. B., Zarnetske, P. L., Lany, N. K. & Thompson, L. A. Open‐top chambers for temperature manipulation in taller‐stature plant communities. Methods Ecol. Evol. 9, 254–259 (2018).
Bao, T., Jia, G. & Xu, X. Warming enhances dominance of vascular plants over cryptogams across northern wetlands. Glob. Change Biol. 28, 4097–4109 (2022).
Oberbauer, S. F. et al. Tundra CO₂ fluxes in response to experimental warming across latitudinal and moisture gradients. Ecol. Monogr. 77, 221–238 (2007).
Natali, S. M., Schuur, E. A., Webb, E. E., Pries, C. E. H. & Crummer, K. G. Permafrost degradation stimulates carbon loss from experimentally warmed tundra. Ecology 95, 602–608 (2014).
Na, L., Genxu, W., Yan, Y., Yongheng, G. & Guangsheng, L. Plant production, and carbon and nitrogen source pools, are strongly intensified by experimental warming in alpine ecosystems in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Soil Biol. Biochem. 43, 942–953 (2011).
Biasi, C. et al. Initial effects of experimental warming on carbon exchange rates, plant growth and microbial dynamics of a lichen-rich dwarf shrub tundra in Siberia. Plant Soil 307, 191–205 (2008).
Wilcox, E. J. et al. Tundra shrub expansion may amplify permafrost thaw by advancing snowmelt timing. Arct. Sci. 5, 202–217 (2019).
Ladrón de Guevara, M. et al. Warming reduces the cover, richness and evenness of lichen‐dominated biocrusts but promotes moss growth: insights from an 8 yr experiment. New Phytol. 220, 811–823 (2018).
Grosse, G., Goetz, S., McGuire, A. D., Romanovsky, V. E. & Schuur, E. A. Changing permafrost in a warming world and feedbacks to the Earth system. Environ. Res. Lett. 11, 040201 (2016).
Schädel, C. et al. Earth system models must include permafrost carbon processes. Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 114–116 (2024).
Bao, T. et al. Climate-carbon feedback tradeoff between Arctic and alpine permafrost under warming. Sci. Adv. 11, eadt8366 (2025).
Obu, J. et al. Northern Hemisphere permafrost map based on TTOP modelling for 2000–2016 at 1 km² scale. Earth-Sci. Rev. 193, 299–316 (2019).
Chandra, R. V. & Varanasi, B. S. Python Requests Essentials. (Packt Publishing, 2015).
Nie, S., Fu, S., Cao, W. & Jia, X. Comparison of monthly air and land surface temperature extremes simulated using CMIP5 and CMIP6 versions of the Beijing Climate Center climate model. Theor. Appl. Climatol. 140, 487–502 (2020).
Hersbach, H. et al. The ERA5 global reanalysis. Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc. 146, 1999–2049 (2020).
Fick, S. E. & Hijmans, R. J. WorldClim 2: new 1‐km spatial resolution climate surfaces for global land areas. Int. J. Climatol. 37, 4302–4315 (2017).
Hedges, L. V., Gurevitch, J. & Curtis, P. S. The meta‐analysis of response ratios in experimental ecology. Ecology 80, 1150–1156 (1999).
Hou, E. et al. Global meta-analysis shows pervasive phosphorus limitation of aboveground plant production in natural terrestrial ecosystems. Nat. Commun. 11, 637 (2020).
Bao, T. et al. Dataset about Warming Effects on Carbon Cycling and Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in Permafrost Ecosystems. Figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29312087 (2025).
Gomez, F. et al. A dataset for soil organic carbon in agricultural systems for the Southeast Asia region. Sci. Data 11, 374 (2024).
Li, X. et al. A global dataset of biochar application effects on crop yield, soil properties, and greenhouse gas emissions. Sci. Data 11, 57 (2024).
Royston, P. Approximating the Shapiro–Wilk W-test for non-normality. Stat. Comput. 2, 117–119 (1992).
Thornton, A. & Lee, P. Publication bias in meta-analysis: its causes and consequences. J. Clin. Epidemiol. 53, 207–216 (2000).
Koricheva, J., Gurevitch, J. & Mengersen, K. Handbook of Meta-analysis in Ecology and Evolution. (Princeton Univ. Press, 2013).
Acknowledgements
We thank all the authors whose work was included in our dataset. This study is funded by National Key R&D Program of China (2022YFF0801904 to X.X. and 2024YFF1307603 to T.B.), and the Open Research Fund of the Key Laboratory of Ecosystem Carbon Source and Sink, China Meteorological Administration (ECSS-CMA), NUIST (ECSS-CMA202402 to T.B.), and Natural Science Foundation of China (#42206254 to T.B.). W.J.R. was supported by the Reducing Uncertainties in Biogeochemical Interactions through Synthesis and Computation (RUBISCO) Scientific Focus Area, Office of Biological and Environmental Research of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC02-05CH11231.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
T.B., X.X. and G.J. conceived this paper. T.B. and X.Z. extracted and integrated the data from studies into Data_Permafrost_Carbon.xlsx. T.B. and X.X. summarized the dataset and drafted the manuscript. All authors revised and approved the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Bao, T., Xu, X., Jia, G. et al. Dataset about Warming Effects on Carbon Cycling and Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in Permafrost Ecosystems. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06600-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06600-0
