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Over the past 40 years, 42% of tropical and subtropical ecosystems have experienced an increase in plant reliance on past precipitation, consistent with greening during the late growing season in drylands and drying during the wet-to-dry period in non-drylands.

Machine learning upscaling analyses of global FLUXNET carbon and water flux measurements indicate that dryland vegetation productivity showed a negligible increase between 1982–2000 and 2001–2022, whereas humid-region vegetation productivity exhibited a nearly constant increase.

The carbon balance in Southeast Asia is highly uncertain. Here, the authors show that land use changes and occurrence of strong El Niño control decadal shifts in the carbon balance of this region.

The extreme hot and dry conditions of 2023 reduced soil respiration and enhanced net forest carbon sequestration in Canada, offsetting wildfire emissions, according to satellite-based and in situ observations of CO₂ fluxes.

The study shows forests near edges store less carbon due to higher environmental stress. Spatial optimization of new forest plantations could boost carbon storage by 986 Tg by 2060, with 53% of the gain from reducing edge effects.

Land-based mitigation for meeting the Paris climate target must consider the carbon cycle impacts of land-use change. Here the authors show that when bioenergy crops replace high carbon content ecosystems, forest-based mitigation could be more effective for CO₂ removal than bioenergy crops with carbon capture and storage.

Accelerated storage of terrestrial carbon during the slow warming period (1998–2012) can be predominantly attributed to lower land-use emissions due to decreased tropical forest loss and increased afforestation in the northern temperate regions.

Drought, fires, and human activities have reversed the accumulation of live biomass carbon in the Northern Hemisphere, with total biomass shifting from a positive to a negative trend around 2016.

The global net land sink is relatively well constrained. However, the responsible drivers and above/below-ground partitioning are highly uncertain. Model issues regarding turnover of individual plant and soil components are responsible.

Soil carbon loss from human agriculture-related land use in the dry tropics largely offsets gains in northern lands, leading to a small net sink of 0.34 ± 0.30 PgC yr⁻¹ at a global scale.

A re-assessment of the global carbon budget shows the natural land sink is substantially smaller than previously estimated, indicating emerging impacts of climate change on the evolution of the carbon sinks.

The impact of land-use and cover-change (LUCC) on ecosystem carbon stock in China is poorly known due to large biases in existing databases. Here the authors develop a new LUCC database with corrected false signals and reveal that forest expansion is the dominant driver of China’s recent carbon sink.

The authors show increased negative extremes in gross primary productivity in northern midlatitude ecosystems, particularly over grasslands and croplands, attributed to impacts of warm droughts. This highlights the vulnerability of terrestrial carbon sinks and food security to increasing extreme events.

Fire emissions in the Amazon and Cerrado biomes are mainly produced from smouldering combustion of woody debris, according to observationally constrained fire emissions inventories.

Rising CO₂ levels reduced drought stress on plants on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau over the past four decades, but this benefit is largely cancelled out by warming that increases plant water demand, as revealed by ecological modelling and multi-source observations from 1979 to 2018.

Soil carbon residence time contributed negatively to soil organic carbon changes induced by land use and land cover changes, with net primary productivity driven changes being the largest source of uncertainty, according to an estimation of soil organic carbon over the past century.

A utility-based assessment shows that the global installation of photovoltaic plants to harness solar energy between 2000 and 2018 led to an increase in terrestrial ecosystem carbon pools of 2.1 TgC.

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.

The authors show China’s forests can sequester 172.3 million tons of carbon per year in biomass by 2100, with an additional 28.1 million tons from improved management practices, but neglecting wood harvest impacts will distort long-term future projections.

Due to fundamental anatomical and biochemical differences, C₃ and C₄ plant species tend to differ in their biogeography and response to climate change. Here, the authors use global observations and optimality theory to map patterns and temporal trends in C₄ species distribution and the contribution of C₄ plants to global photosynthesis.

Satellite records combined with global ecosystem models show a persistent and widespread greening over 25–50% of the global vegetated area; less than 4% of the globe is browning. CO₂ fertilization explains 70% of the observed greening trend.

Assessing potential future carbon loss from tropical forests is important for evaluating the efficacy of programmes for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD). An exploration of results from 22 climate models in conjunction with a land surface scheme suggests that in the Americas, Africa and Asia, the resilience of tropical forests to climate change is higher than expected, although uncertainties are large.

More radiation generally increases vegetation photosynthesis, but field studies show that a given amount of diffuse radiation leads to more fixed carbon than direct radiation. Mercado and colleagues simulate the effect of late twentieth century increases in the diffuse radiation fraction, and find that the terrestrial carbon sink is enhanced by about 25% —paradoxically, reducing future anthropogenic pollution will reduce this diffuse radiation effect, creating a positive feedback to global warming.

Growing biomass carbon stock in China between 2001 and 2020 is driven by conservation and anthropogenic expansion of woodland.

Fire impacts soil organic carbon stocks, in addition to aboveground biomass, yet changes are not well constrained. This study shows that more soil carbon is lost from drier ecosystems than humid ones and that the carbon sink is increasing in savannah–grassland regions with declining burned area.

Anthropogenic ground-level ozone substantially reduces the productivity of tropical forests and so their carbon drawdown, according to ozone susceptibility experiments and dynamic global vegetation modelling.

Tropical aboveground biomass carbon is a crucial, yet complex, component of the terrestrial C budget. Here remote observations demonstrate that fire emissions and post-fire recovery in non-forested African biomes dominate the interannual variability of aboveground biomass carbon, which acts as a moderate net C sink.

Plant respiration at night is assumed to be temperature-controlled. Here, the authors show that temperature controls less than half of the variation in leaf respiration rate at night, and demonstrate how to account for such nocturnal variation in biosphere models.

Carbon loss from forests occurs through deforestation or the degradation of existing forest. The loss of forest area in the Brazilian Amazon was higher in 2019 than following drought and an El Niño event in 2015, yet degradation drove three times more biomass loss than deforestation from 2010 to 2019.

The model–inventory discrepancy in net land-use carbon emissions mainly results from conceptual differences in estimating anthropogenic forest sinks. A revised disaggregation of global land model results allows greater comparability with inventories.

Robust quantification of carbon dioxide fluxes from land use is critical for guiding climate change mitigation efforts and for improved understanding of the global carbon cycle. This Perspective explores the origins of uncertainties and discrepancies in established estimation approaches and considers strategies to improve, translate and harmonize flux estimates.

Changes in the leaf area index alter the distribution of heat and moisture. The change in energy partitioning related to leaf area, increasing latent and decreasing sensible fluxes over the observational period 1982–2016, is moderated by plant functional type and background climate.

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.

Northern Hemisphere photosynthesis is thought to respond positively to temperature variations, yet the strength of this relationship may change over time. Here, using a combination of satellite data and models, the authors assess the temporal change of this relationship over the past three decades.

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

Carbon sequestration by Siberian forests has been low over the past decade due to disturbances that have decreased live biomass and increased dead wood, according to passive microwave observations.

Analysis of satellite-based data on recovering degraded and secondary forests in three tropical moist forest regions quantifies the amount of aboveground carbon accumulated, which counterbalanced one quarter of carbon emissions from old-growth forest loss between 1984 and 2018.

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.

This study uses regional and global remote sensing data to assess the regrowth of secondary forests in the Brazilian Amazon biome. The authors find differences of regrowth rates due to climate, forest fires and deforestation actions and further quantify their carbon capture potential.

The impact of projected changes in ozone levels on the land-carbon sink are estimated with the help of a global carbon cycle model, which accounts for interactions between ozone and carbon dioxide through stomatal closure. A significant suppression of the global land carbon sink as increases in ozone concentrations affect plant productivity is found. The resulting indirect radiative forcing by ozone effects on plants could contribute more to global warming than the direct radiative forcing.

Northern Hemisphere greening in early spring stimulated biomass production in forest ecosystems more strongly than in semi-arid grasslands during summer over the 1982–2015 period, according to an analysis based on explainable machine learning of satellite-based data and model simulations.

Climate feedbacks associated with wetland methane emissions and permafrost-thaw carbon release substantially reduce available carbon budgets to achieve temperature targets, suggest simulations with a climate–land-surface model system.

Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) will impact agricultural land use and its economic value in Great Britain. Ritchie et al. model the impacts of smooth (conventional climate change) and abrupt (tipping point change) AMOC collapse on land use, arable farming and related economic outputs in Britain, as well as the economic feasibility of technological adaptations such as widespread irrigation.

New global datasets of upper canopy vegetation respiration have become available and their impact on global carbon cycle models is unclear. Here, the authors show the implications of these parameterisations with a global gridded land model and report significantly higher global plant respiration estimates.