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Biogeochemistry

Large rise in carbon uptake by land plants

Nature volume 544, pages 39–40 (2017)Cite this article

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A proxy for the amount of carbon dioxide taken up by plants for photosynthesis has been used to estimate historical global uptake, revealing a large increase that might partly offset the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels. See Letter p.84

The rate of increase of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide largely reflects the balance between anthropogenic emissions and natural uptake by the biosphere and the oceans1. Photosynthesis by land plants accounts for the greatest uptake of CO2, but this flux cannot be measured directly, and estimates2 of the changes in the flux during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have varied enormously — between +5% and +52%. On page 84, Campbell et al.3 report that measurements of atmospheric levels of a gas called carbonyl sulfide (COS) can be used as a tracer of global changes in photosynthetic CO2 uptake. The authors thus provide a much-needed global observational constraint on historical increases in this uptake, which they argue must be at the high end of previous estimates.

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Figure 1: Global cycling of carbon dioxide and carbonyl sulfide (COS).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dan Yakir is in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.,

    Dan Yakir

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  1. Dan Yakir
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Correspondence to Dan Yakir.

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Yakir, D. Large rise in carbon uptake by land plants. Nature 544, 39–40 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/544039a

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