The important role of the terrestrial biosphere as a carbon sink that moderates atmospheric CO2 concentrations — and ultimately the amount of climate change we experience — is long established. However, our understanding of the relative contribution of different processes to the overall sink effect remains surprisingly limited.
Thomas Pugh from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany and co-workers assess the effect of agricultural land management on terrestrial carbon dynamics by adding representations of agricultural management (including harvest, grazing and tillage) to a dynamic global vegetation model.
They find that accounting for these effects resulted in simulations with cumulative emissions from land-use change since 1850 around 70% larger compared with those that ignored these processes. The majority of Earth system models omit these processes, suggesting either a general overestimation in their present-day terrestrial carbon sink or an underestimation of the increase in biospheric carbon uptake resulting from environmental change.
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Brown, A. Agricultural management. Nature Clim Change 6, 127 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2928
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2928
