Climate-change ecology articles within Nature Geoscience

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  • News & Views |

    A 3-year field experiment suggests plant responses to elevated CO2 in phosphorus-limited grasslands depends on the biogeochemical interplay between soil microbes and plants.

    • Benjamin L. Turner

  • Article |

    Projections of forest aboveground carbon storage potential in the United States show divergent results across different modelling approaches due to uncertainties in the estimated impact of climate risks, according to a comparison of modelling results.

    • Chao Wu
    • , Shane R. Coffield
    •  & William R. L. Anderegg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global estimations of the water-storage capacity in the rooting zone from satellite data reveal plant access to deep water across a third of Earth’s vegetated surface.

    • Benjamin D. Stocker
    • , Shersingh Joseph Tumber-Dávila
    •  & Robert B. Jackson

  • News & Views |

    Some coastal marshes may have a hard time building soil elevation under future climate conditions, although this may reduce methane emissions, according to four years of field manipulation of warming and elevated CO2 in a coastal wetland.

    • Thomas L. O’Halloran
    •  & Georgia S. Seyfried

  • News & Views |

    The biological processes that control the release of carbon stored in land are dependent on water availability. A global analysis of temperature sensitivity reveals how hydrometeorological processes modulate the response of land carbon turnover to temperature.

    • Yuanyuan Huang
    •  & Yingping Wang

  • Article |

    Internal waves can relieve coral reef heat stress, according to an analysis that isolates the effect at different depths using a compilation of high-resolution temperature records.

    • Alex S. J. Wyatt
    • , James J. Leichter
    •  & Toshi Nagata

  • News & Views |

    African savannah grasslands initially proliferated in the late Miocene due to declining atmospheric CO2, rather than previously proposed regional climate drying. Supplanting previous woodland vegetation due to photosynthetic adaptations, these grasslands set the stage for subsequent mammalian evolutionary trends on the continent.

    • Hayley Cawthra

  • Article |

    Elephant disturbance favours the emergence of larger trees with higher wood density, and thereby increases the aboveground biomass in central African forests by up to 60 t ha–1, according to simulations with the Ecosystem Demography model.

    • Fabio Berzaghi
    • , Marcos Longo
    •  & Christopher E. Doughty

  • News & Views |

    Mangrove canopy heights vary around the world in response to rain, storms and human activities, suggests a global analysis of mangrove canopy height. How tall the trees are matters for estimating global mangrove carbon storage.

    • Daniel A. Friess

  • Article |

    Prescribed burning has far less impacts on peat growth and carbon sequestration than previously thought, according to a long-term experiment in fire-managed peat moorlands in England. Managed burning may be a viable strategy to make peatlands more resilient to devastating wildfire.

    • R. H. Marrs
    • , E.-L. Marsland
    •  & R. C. Chiverrell

  • Article |

    Biocrust coverage of soils could decrease by 25–40% within 65 years, due to climate and land-use changes. Biocrusts, such as lichens and algae, cover 12% of Earth’s land surface but environmental modelling suggests that they are vulnerable to change.

    • Emilio Rodriguez-Caballero
    • , Jayne Belnap
    •  & Bettina Weber

  • Letter |

    Forests may be vulnerable to future droughts. A tree mortality threshold based on plant hydraulics suggests that increased drought may trigger widespread dieback in the southwestern United States by mid-century.

    • William R. L. Anderegg
    • , Alan Flint
    •  & Christopher B. Field

  • News & Views |

    Carbon dioxide can stimulate photosynthesis in trees and increase their growth rates. A study of tree rings from three seasonal tropical forests shows no evidence of faster growth during 150 years of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

    • Lucas A. Cernusak

  • Commentary |

    Livestock production accounts for a significant fraction of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Progress in mitigating the adverse environmental impacts of this industry can be improved by shifting research emphases and fostering communication between researchers and ranchers.

    • Joseph M. Craine

  • Review Article |

    Feedbacks between the terrestrial carbon cycle and climate change could affect many ecosystem functions and services. A synthesis of global air temperature data reveals non-uniform rates of climate warming on diurnal and seasonal timescales, and heterogeneous impacts on ecosystem carbon cycling.

    • Jianyang Xia
    • , Jiquan Chen
    •  & Shiqiang Wan

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