Fig. 2: Relative changes in soil respiration (SR) and heterotrophic respiration (HR) under different conditions due to water table (WT) decline in pristine peatlands.

a Relative changes in SR due to WT decline. b Relative changes in HR due to WT decline (AR was not shown due to the scarcity of data points (n = 35)). The larger solid circles and horizontal bars denote the weighted means of relative changes and their 95% confidence intervals. The smaller circles and the numbers indicate individual relative changes due to WT decline and numbers of data points, respectively. The asterisks *, **, *** indicate significance at the levels of p < 0.05, 0.01 and 0.001, respectively, and n.s. indicates no significance (for details, see Meta-analysis in Methods). Net water table declines greater and less than 30 cm are defined as deep and shallow declines, respectively, according to ref. 42.