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Terrestrial biogeochemistry

Carbon turnover gets wet

Nature Geoscience volume 15, pages 960–961 (2022)Cite this article

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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.

Whether land acts as a carbon sink or source depends largely on two opposite fluxes: carbon uptake through photosynthesis and carbon release through turnover. Turnover occurs through multiple processes, including but not limited to, leaf senescence, tree mortality, and respiration by plants, microbes, and animals. Each of these processes is sensitive to climate, and ecologists and climatologists have been working to figure out how temperature regulates biological activities and to what extent the carbon cycle responds to global warming. Previous theoretical and experimental studies have yielded conflicting relationships between temperature and carbon turnover, with large variations across ecosystems, climate and time-scale1,2,3,4. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Fan et al.5 find that hydrometeorological factors have an important influence on how the turnover time of land carbon responds to changes in temperature.

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Fig. 1: A peatland ecosystem in Peru.

Rupesh Bhomia, CIFOR-ICRAF

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Victoria, Australia

    Yuanyuan Huang & Yingping Wang

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  1. Yuanyuan Huang
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  2. Yingping Wang
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Correspondence to Yuanyuan Huang.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Huang, Y., Wang, Y. Carbon turnover gets wet. Nat. Geosci. 15, 960–961 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-022-01098-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-022-01098-8

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