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The key role of forest disturbance in reconciling estimates of the northern carbon sink

Journal Article · · Communications Earth & Environment
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  1. Univ. of Exeter (United Kingdom)
  2. Univ. of Exeter (United Kingdom); Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, Gif‐sur‐Yvette (France); Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) (France); Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), Paris (France); Sorbonne Univ., Paris (France); Ecole Polytechnique (France)
  3. Wageningen Univ. (Netherlands)
  4. Karlsruhe Inst. of Technology (KIT) (Germany). Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research/Atmospheric Environmental Research
  5. Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, Victoria, BC (Canada)
  6. Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), Yokohama (Japan). Research Institute for Global Change
  7. Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, Gif‐sur‐Yvette (France). Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement; Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), Cadarache (France); Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) (France); Univ. Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette (France)
  8. Ludwig Maximilian Univ. of Munich, Munich (Germany)
  9. Univ. of Edinburgh, Scotland (United Kingdom)
  10. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg (Austria)
  11. Woodwell Climate Research Center, Falmouth, MA (United States)
  12. Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States)
  13. Institute of Applied Energy (IAE), Tokyo (Japan)
  14. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, CO (United States)
  15. Univ. of Western Sydney, NSW (Australia); Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Canberra, ACT (Australia)
  16. National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Tsukuba (Japan); Meteorological Research Inst. (MRI), Tsukuba (Japan)
  17. Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), Yokohama (Japan). Research Institute for Global Change; Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto (Japan)
  18. Ludwig Maximilian Univ. of Munich, Munich (Germany); Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg (Germany)
  19. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, MD (United States)
  20. Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena (Germany)
  21. Univ. of Bern (Switzerland)
  22. Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA (United States)
  23. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
  24. Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing (China). Institute of Atmospheric Physics
  25. Sun Yat-Sen Univ., Guangzhou (China)
  26. Nanjing Univ. of Information Science and Technology (NUIST) (China)
+ Show Author Affiliations
Northern forests are an important carbon sink, but our understanding of the driving factors is limited due to discrepancies between dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) and atmospheric inversions. We show that DGVMs simulate a 50% lower sink (1.1 ± 0.5 PgC yr–1 over 2001–2021) across North America, Europe, Russia, and China compared to atmospheric inversions (2.2 ± 0.6 PgC yr–1). We explain why DGVMs underestimate the carbon sink by considering how they represent disturbance processes, specifically the overestimation of fire emissions, and the lack of robust forest demography resulting in lower forest regrowth rates than observed. We reconcile net sink estimates by using alternative disturbance-related fluxes. We estimate carbon uptake through forest regrowth by combining satellite-derived forest age and biomass maps. We calculate a regrowth flux of 1.1 ± 0.1 PgC yr–1, and combine this with satellite-derived estimates of fire emissions (0.4 ± 0.1 PgC yr–1), land-use change emissions from bookkeeping models (0.9 ± 0.2 PgC yr–1), and the DGVM-estimated sink from CO2 fertilisation, nitrogen deposition, and climate change (2.2 ± 0.9 PgC yr–1). The resulting ‘bottom-up’ net flux of 2.1 ± 0.9 PgC yr–1 agrees with atmospheric inversions. The reconciliation holds at regional scales, increasing confidence in our results.
Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
2478329
Journal Information:
Communications Earth & Environment, Journal Name: Communications Earth & Environment Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 5; ISSN 2662-4435
Publisher:
Springer NatureCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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