Tipping points of terrestrial biome carbon storage

Abstract:

Here, we use a simple land carbon budget model to investigate the tipping points of terrestrial carbon storage to climate change and the increasing of atmospheric CO₂ based on data produced by the earth system models and collected by FLUXNET. We found that with increasing of atmospheric CO₂: (1) the carbon storage of broadleaf evergreen forests will keep increasing even the increasing rate becomes slow; (2) the capacity of coniferous forest carbon storage will become saturated at certain level of atmospheric CO₂; and (3) the terrestrial ecosystems of tundra, C3 and C4 grasslands will transit from carbon sinks into carbon sources at critical level of the atmospheric CO₂, respectively.

Acknowledgements

This work was performed while CY was a Rossby Fellow, and he is grateful to the International Meteorological Institute of Sweden.