The soils of northern forests are key reservoirs that help keep the carbon dioxide that trees inhale and use for photosynthesis from making it back into the atmosphere. But a unique experiment led by Peter Reich of the University of Michigan is showing that, on a warming planet, more carbon is escaping the soil than is being added by plants.
The soils of northern forests are key reservoirs that help keep the carbon dioxide that trees inhale and use for photosynthesis from making it back into the atmosphere. But a unique experiment led by Peter Reich of the University of Michigan is showing that, on a warming planet, more carbon is escaping the soil than is being added by plants.
„This is not good news because it suggests that, as the world warms, soils are going to give back some of their carbon to the atmosphere“, said Reich, director of the Institute for Global Change Biology at U-M.
„The big picture story is that losing more carbon is always going to be a bad thing for climate“, said Guopeng Liang, the lead author of the study published in Nature Geoscience. Liang was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota during the study and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University and an exchange fellow at the Institute for Global Change Biology.
By understanding how rising temperatures affect the flow of carbon into and out of soils, scientists can better understand and forecast changes in our planet’s climate.
