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Recent divergence in the contributions of tropical and boreal forests to the terrestrial carbon sink

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 4, pages 202–209 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Anthropogenic land use and land cover changes (LULCC) have a large impact on the global terrestrial carbon sink, but this effect is not well characterized according to biogeographical region. Here, using state-of-the-art Earth observation data and a dynamic global vegetation model, we estimate the impact of LULCC on the contribution of biomes to the terrestrial carbon sink between 1992 and 2015. Tropical and boreal forests contributed equally, and with the largest share of the mean global terrestrial carbon sink. CO2 fertilization was found to be the main driver increasing the terrestrial carbon sink from 1992 to 2015, but the net effect of all drivers (CO2 fertilization and nitrogen deposition, LULCC and meteorological forcing) caused a reduction and an increase, respectively, in the terrestrial carbon sink for tropical and boreal forests. These diverging trends were not observed when applying a conventional LULCC dataset, but were also evident in satellite passive microwave estimates of aboveground biomass. These datasets thereby converge on the conclusion that LULCC have had a greater impact on tropical forests than previously estimated, causing an increase and decrease of the contributions of boreal and tropical forests, respectively, to the growing terrestrial carbon sink.

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Fig. 1: Agreement between the global net terrestrial carbon (C) exchange as estimated by the LPJ-GUESS model with the ESA-CCI dataset and as estimated by the multi-model mean of the GCP.
Fig. 2: Contribution of biomes to AGB.
Fig. 3: Contributions of biomes to the global terrestrial carbon sink for 1992–2015.
Fig. 4: Impact of drivers on the trends in the net terrestrial carbon exchange.
Fig. 5: Comparison between model simulations using different land use and land cover change datasets.

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Data availability

Data from the ESA-CCI land cover dataset is freely available from ESA-CCI (http://www.esa-landcover-cci.org/?q=node/169)15. The Köppen climate classification is freely available at https://earthdata.nasa.gov. The LPJ-GUESS simulated terrestrial carbon exchange estimates, the simulated AGB data, the fractions of woody, herbaceous and bares land, and the annual SMOS L-VOD data are available at https://doi.org/10.17894/ucph.7a8d3a3c-6056-445b-b05c-4212231aff40. The VOD-AGB dataset derived over the period 1993–2012 can be accessed at http://www.wenfo.org/wald/global-biomass18. For the TRENDY data, please see http://dgvm.ceh.ac.uk/node/21/.

Code availability

The codes used in the data analysis is available at https://doi.org/10.17894/ucph.7a8d3a3c-6056-445b-b05c-4212231aff40. The codes are: 1) the code used for converting the ESA-CCI land cover to fractions of woody, herbaceous and bares land; 2) the codes used for separating the terrestrial Earth surface into its different biomes; 3) the codes used for partitioning the global-scale mean, trend and interannual variability in the terrestrial carbon sink to the different biomes; and 4) the codes used for the factorial simulations.

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Acknowledgements

This research work was funded by the Swedish National Space Board (Dnr 95/16) (T.T.) and the Danish Council for Independent Research (DFF), grant ID: DFF–6111-00258 (T.T., R.F., S.H. and M.B.). S.H. additionally acknowledges funding from the Belgian Science Policy Office in the frame of the U-TURN project (SR/00/339 and SR/00/366). M.B. was supported by an AXA post-doctoral fellowship. J.-P.W. acknowledges funding from Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (TOSCA programme) and from the European Space Agency. F.T. was supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant (project number 746347).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Torbern Tagesson, Feng Tian, Anders Ahlström, Jonas Ardö, Stefan Olin & Zhendong Wu

  2. Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Torbern Tagesson, Guy Schurgers, Stéphanie Horion, Martin Brandt & Rasmus Fensholt

  3. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, IPSL, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Philippe Ciais

  4. Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Anders Ahlström

  5. Interactions Sol Plante Atmosphére, INRA, Université Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France

    Jean-Pierre Wigneron & Lei Fan

  6. Collaborative Innovation Center on Forecast and Evaluation of Meteorological Disaster, School of Geographical Sciences, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China

    Lei Fan

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Contributions

T.T., R.F., G.S. and S.H. designed the study. T.T., S.H. and R.F. prepared the ESA-CCI data. G.S. conducted the LPJ-GUESS simulations. J.-P.W., L.F. and F.T. prepared SMOS-IC L-VOD data. S.O. and G.S. prepared the LUH2 data. T.T. and G.S. analysed the data. The results were interpreted by T.T., R.F., G.S., S.H., P.C., A.A., J.A. and Z.W. with contributions from all co-authors. The manuscript was drafted by T.T., R.F., G.S., P.C., S.H., F.T., A.A. and M.B. with contributions from all co-authors.

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Correspondence to Torbern Tagesson.

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Supplementary Methods, Results, discussions, Figs. 1–11 and Tables 1–9.

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Tagesson, T., Schurgers, G., Horion, S. et al. Recent divergence in the contributions of tropical and boreal forests to the terrestrial carbon sink. Nat Ecol Evol 4, 202–209 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-1090-0

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