Abstract
Global net land carbon uptake or net biome production (NBP) has increased during recent decades1. Whether its temporal variability and autocorrelation have changed during this period, however, remains elusive, even though an increase in both could indicate an increased potential for a destabilized carbon sink2,3. Here, we investigate the trends and controls of net terrestrial carbon uptake and its temporal variability and autocorrelation from 1981 to 2018 using two atmospheric-inversion models, the amplitude of the seasonal cycle of atmospheric CO2 concentration derived from nine monitoring stations distributed across the Pacific Ocean and dynamic global vegetation models. We find that annual NBP and its interdecadal variability increased globally whereas temporal autocorrelation decreased. We observe a separation of regions characterized by increasingly variable NBP, associated with warm regions and increasingly variable temperatures, lower and weaker positive trends in NBP and regions where NBP became stronger and less variable. Plant species richness presented a concave-down parabolic spatial relationship with NBP and its variability at the global scale whereas nitrogen deposition generally increased NBP. Increasing temperature and its increasing variability appear as the most important drivers of declining and increasingly variable NBP. Our results show increasing variability of NBP regionally that can be mostly attributed to climate change and that may point to destabilization of the coupled carbon–climate system.
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Data availability
Data supporting the findings of this study are available in the following open repositories: CAMS (https://ads.atmosphere.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/cams-global-greenhouse-gas-inversion);CarboScope (http://www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/CarboScope/);and atmospheric CO2 concentration (https://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/data/atmospheric_co2/).Data from the TRENDY ensembles can be provided on request from https://globalcarbonbudgetdata.org/. Data to perform the statistical analyses, calculations and figures are publicly available at Figshare: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.17081717.v5. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
Code and data to perform the statistical analyses, calculations and figures are publicly available at Figshare: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.17081717.v5.
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the Spanish Government project PID2019-110521GB-I00, the Fundación Ramón Areces project CIVP20A6621, the Catalan government project SGR2017-1005 and the European Research Council project ERCSyG-2013-610028 IMBALANCE-P. M.F.-M. was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship of the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO) and by a fellowship from ‘la Caixa’ Foundation (ID 100010434), code LCF/BQ/PI21/11830010. This material is based upon work supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is a major facility sponsored by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. 1852977. Computing and data storage resources, including the Cheyenne supercomputer (doi:10.5065/D6RX99HX), were provided by the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) at NCAR. We acknowledge the Scripps CO2 programme for providing the records of atmospheric CO2.
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M.F.-M., J.P. and I.A.J. planned and designed the research. F.C., C.R., S.S., P.F., V.A., D.G., A.K.J., D.L.L. and P.C.M. provided the data. M.F.-M. analysed the data. All previously mentioned authors, along with P.C., M.O., J.S., S.V. and H.Y., contributed substantially to the writing of the manuscript.
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Fernández-Martínez, M., Peñuelas, J., Chevallier, F. et al. Diagnosing destabilization risk in global land carbon sinks. Nature 615, 848–853 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05725-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05725-1
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