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Topsoil nitrogen stocks declined over a ten-year field warming experiment in a permafrost ecosystem due to enhanced plant nitrogen uptake, nitrogen leaching and gaseous losses, suggesting that permafrost soil nitrogen stocks are vulnerable to warming.

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.

The authors reveal that the Tibetan alpine permafrost region currently functions as a marginal CH₄ sink, and that future flux trajectories diverge under different emission scenarios as a result of the coupled effects of climate forcing and atmospheric CH₄ dynamics.

Using satellite and carbon-flux data, the authors show that enhanced gross primary productivity in recent decades is driven primarily by increases in the rate, rather than the duration, of carbon uptake. They highlight asymmetric changes in productivity across seasons, which may worsen under climate change.

The authors undertake a global-scale, long-term analysis of trends in post-fire biomass recovery, examining the influence of fire severity and climatic drivers before and after 2010. They find that since 2001 forest recovery has been increasingly sensitive to fire severity.

Elevated nitrogen deposition has threatened ecosystem structure, functioning, and resilience. Integrating multiple-scale data in China, the authors reveal that nitrogen deposition favors later leaf senescence in woody species, with implications for ecosystem-climate feedbacks.

Cities serve as climate change laboratories for phenology studies. Here, the authors show that results of such studies should be interpreted with caution, as urban-rural phenology gaps are primarily driven by species composition differences rather than temperature differences.

PM_2.5 pollution partially counteracts vegetation greening trends by delaying green-up dates and reducing photosynthetic activity. This study shows that the negative feedback between PM_2.5 pollution and terrestrial carbon uptake introduces unforeseen uncertainty in China’s carbon neutrality goals.

Satellite data show declining global forest recovery from tree mortality since the 1990s, driven by warming and water scarcity. Canopy water recovers slower than greenness, stressing the need for a multifaceted approach to assessing recovery.

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.

The authors investigate the impacts of drought legacy on springtime leaf unfolding and green-up. They show that drought delays springtime phenology, primarily through exogenous environmental memory effects, and suggest that future spring advances may be dampened by increasing drought.

Precipitation impacts leaf senescence. Here, the authors use carbon flux and satellite data to demonstrate that reduced precipitation frequency is associated with a faster drought response in trees and show that Earth system models don’t capture the impact of reduced precipitation.

Climate-sensitive disturbances, such as droughts and wildfires, impact terrestrial carbon uptake. Here the sensitivity of ecosystem productivity to disturbance is found to diverge between regions, with dryland ecosystems becoming particularly vulnerable under a warming climate.

Global potential forestation could provide about 0.06 °C of biophysical cooling, yet this benefit is expected to diminish as atmospheric CO₂ increases, primarily because background climate shifts weaken the non-local cooling mechanisms.

Cover crops can improve agricultural sustainability. In this meta-analysis, the authors find that a biculture of legume and non-legume cover crops is optimal and may promote multiple agroecosystem services while mitigating climate-related yield losses by 2100.

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.

Climate warming causes earlier spring phenological events and higher risk of late spring frost damage. Here, the authors investigate the impact of late spring frosts on phenological events, finding that they delayed flowering by an average of 6 days across 640 species.

Accurately predicting how much rising atmospheric carbon dioxide can increase rice production is important for managing global rice production. This study highlights that elevated carbon dioxide will boost rice yields more in middle-to-high-income countries than in low-income countries, and that this yield gap will continue to widen in the future.

The authors quantify how climate change-related disturbances—drought, fires and insect outbreaks—impact the sensitivity of primary productivity to subsequent water stress. They show significant increases in sensitivity following drought and fire, leading to decreased terrestrial carbon uptake.

Scrutinizing the empirical evidence for bidirectional trade-offs in fine root traits, the authors show that while these are important in explaining species occurrences along broad temperature and water availability gradients, unidirectional benefits are prevalent.

The authors use ground-based records and remote-sensing data to show that late spring frost delays the timing of spring leaf-out in the subsequent year by reducing photosynthetic productivity. Integrating late spring frost into models can increase the accuracy of predictions of spring timings and carbon cycling.

Combining long-term atmospheric CO₂ records with satellite observations of vegetation activities across the Northern Hemisphere, the authors identify a weakening trend of the link between spring and summer productivity over the past 40 years.

Canopy nitrification contributes up to 80% of the nitrate reaching the soils via throughfall in European forests, according to analyses of nitrogen deposition and oxygen isotopes in nitrate at ten forested sites.

Meteorological drought cascades into soil and ecological droughts, which disproportionately amplify ecohydrological damage to 162–310% of initial intensity, according to global remote sensing, observational, and reanalysis data.

Leaf functional traits are increasingly used as proxies for plant functions. Here, the authors show that leaf water affects other leaf traits and is a better predictor of whole-leaf photosynthesis and leaf area than leaf nitrogen or phosphorus content.

Phenology studies tend to use air temperature instead of plant tissue temperature. This study provides evidence that air and plant temperatures differ to such an extent as to make us reconsider our current interpretation of phenology.

A comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms of vegetation maximum gross primary production is lacking. Here the authors show that the seasonal peak photosynthesis is hindered by late canopy development due to climatic and nutrient limitations.

The global distribution of tree species shows obvious edges corresponding to the boundaries of biomes due to high spatial climate heterogeneity. The poleward migration of tree species as a result of climate change will be hindered by steep climatic gradients.

The response of CO₂ release from soils to warming is enhanced at thermokarst sites due to the lower soil substrate quality and higher microorganism abundance than non-thermokarst locations, according to in situ warming experiments at an upland thermokarst on the Tibetan Plateau.

The authors combine 393,139 forest inventory plots with satellite data to understand the impact of biodiversity on the sensitivity of spring leaf-out dates to temperature (S_T). They show that high diversity significantly weakens S_T, a relationship that Earth system models largely fail to reproduce.

The authors use tree-ring width data across the extratropical Northern Hemisphere to show that earlier growing season onsets lead to enhanced tree radial growth in cold humid but not in dry areas.

Changes in precipitation remains an understudied factor that can impact leaf onset date (LOD) under climate change. The authors show that decreasing precipitation frequency has contributed to LOD advancement, and that incorporating precipitation data projects earlier LOD than currently predicted.

The authors investigate the broad-scale climatological and soil properties that co-vary with major axes of plant functional traits. They find that variation in plant size is attributed to latitudinal gradients in water or energy limitation, while variation in leaf economics traits is attributed to both climate and soil fertility including their interaction.

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

Earthquakes can cause decadal-scale shifts in forest growth resilience by increasing the infiltration of precipitation through earthquake-induced soil cracks, according to global analyses of tree-ring width and historic earthquake data.

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 warming is advancing spring leaf unfolding, but it is also reducing the cold periods that many trees require to break winter dormancy. Here, the authors show that 7 of 12 current chilling models fail to account for the correct relationship between chilling accumulation and heat requirement, leading to substantial overestimates of the advance of spring phenology under climate change.

Low-frequency vegetation optical depth (L-VOD) sensing reveals global patterns of seasonal variations in ecosystem-scale plant water storage and relationships with leaf phenology; results vary between tropical and temperate–boreal zones.

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.

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.

Describing changes in the timing of life history events is critical to understanding effects of climate change. Wang et al. relocated plant communities up and down elevation gradients and found that warming lengthened the reproductive and activity phases, while cooling reduced the vegetative and reproductive phases.

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 authors show a recent decoupling of the tropical temperature variations and the carbon cycle that is driven by wetter conditions in the tropics.

Plant-available phosphorus declines in paddy soils as atmospheric CO₂ increases, according to long-term free air carbon dioxide enrichment experiments of rice plants.

Tree species diversity promotes drought resistance in nearly half of global forests, according to a global analysis of the relationship between species richness and drought-induced changes in forest productivity.