Article
Soil Science
Linden Fairbairn, Fereidoun Rezanezhad, Mehdi Gharasoo, Chris T. Parsons, Merrin L. Macrae, Stephanie Slowinski, Philippe Van Cappellen
Summary: Soil moisture is an important variable in predicting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Previous studies have focused on aerobic respiration as the source of CO2, ignoring anaerobic processes. This study conducted experiments at different moisture levels under both oxic and anoxic conditions. The results showed that moderate moisture levels resulted in maximum CO2 fluxes, but substantial CO2 fluxes were also measured at fully saturated conditions. Methane (CH4) fluxes increased over time in anoxic conditions. A kinetic model was proposed to represent both aerobic and anaerobic CO2 production. This study highlights the importance of considering anaerobic reaction pathways in predicting soil CO2 production at high moisture levels.
Article
Ecology
Xueqin Li, Yan Yan, Lijiao Fu
Summary: The study found that water significantly affects ecosystem respiration and soil respiration in a typical alpine steppe in Northern Tibet, with soil moisture showing a positive linear relationship with Re and Rs. Through multiple linear regression analysis, soil temperature and water content were identified as key factors influencing Rs and Re.
FRONTIERS IN ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
(2021)
Article
Agriculture, Multidisciplinary
Olga Sukhoveeva, Dmitry Karelin, Tatiana Lebedeva, Alexander Pochikalov, Oleg Ryzhkov, Gennady Suvorov, Alipiy Zolotukhin
Summary: This study aimed to investigate carbon fluxes and pools in the sector of agriculture and land use in the European part of Russia. It found that croplands, pastures, and forests can absorb methane and nitrous oxide, while livestock facilities are potent sources of these greenhouse gases. Simulation modeling showed that winter wheat can accumulate soil organic carbon, while other crops lead to a decrease in carbon stocks.
AGRICULTURE ECOSYSTEMS & ENVIRONMENT
(2023)
Article
Environmental Studies
Huimin Zou, Jiquan Chen, Changliang Shao, Gang Dong, Meihui Duan, Qingsong Zhu, Xianglan Li
Summary: Selecting an appropriate model for simulating ecosystem respiration is crucial for understanding the carbon cycle of terrestrial ecosystems. In this study, six respiration models were evaluated and compared in four grassland ecosystems on the Mongolian Plateau. The results showed that ecosystem respiration increased exponentially with soil temperature and was influenced by soil moisture. The Martin model demonstrated the best performance among the six models. However, no single model performed best for all four grassland types, indicating the need for considering different factors in ecosystem respiration modeling.
Article
Environmental Sciences
E. G. Wangari, R. M. Mwanake, D. Kraus, C. Werner, G. M. Gettel, R. Kiese, L. Breuer, K. Butterbach-Bahl, T. Houska
Summary: The study quantified the landscape soil greenhouse gas exchange within 6 km² in central Germany using fast-box chamber technique. Results showed that seasonality and land use had significant impacts on fluxes, while soil type and slope had minor effects. Additionally, more chamber measurement locations are needed to assess landscape-scale N2O fluxes compared to CO2 and CH4.
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH-BIOGEOSCIENCES
(2022)
Article
Forestry
Hojin Lee, Jihyeon Jeon, Minseok Kang, Sungsik Cho, Juhan Park, Minsu Lee, HoonTaek Lee, Danbi Kim, Hyun Seok Kim
Summary: The study compared the resilience of evergreen Korean pine and deciduous oak forests to drought, finding that the pine forest became a net carbon source during the drought while the oak forest showed smaller changes. Although some recovery was seen in subsequent years, the issues caused by drought legacies were not fully resolved.
FOREST ECOLOGY AND MANAGEMENT
(2021)
Article
Biodiversity Conservation
Ruirui Yan, Yu Zhang, Miao Wang, Ruiqiang Li, Dongyan Jin, Xiaoping Xin, Linghao Li
Summary: The study found that different grazing intensities have varying effects on ecosystem respiration, with ungrazed grasslands having the highest annual Re rate. The annual Re rate is influenced by standing plant aboveground biomass, while heavily grazed areas are controlled by NH4+-N content and available phosphorus.
ECOLOGICAL INDICATORS
(2021)
Article
Water Resources
Andrew M. Ireson, Ines Sanchez-Rodriguez, Sujan Basnet, Haley Brauner, Talia Bobenic, Rosa Brannen, Mennatullah Elrashidy, Morgan Braaten, Seth K. Amankwah, Alan Barr
Summary: This study uses soil moisture data from five long-term field sites and tests two configurations to constrain modelled hydrological fluxes. The results show that the calibration based on hydraulic properties outperforms the texture-based calibration in reproducing changes in soil moisture storage. However, both methods perform reasonably well, especially in the summer months. The predicted hydrological fluxes, when constrained by soil moisture observations, have large uncertainties associated with equifinality. The uncertainty is larger for the hydraulic properties-based calibration, despite its better performance. Therefore, additional sources of information are recommended to reduce uncertainties.
HYDROLOGICAL PROCESSES
(2022)
Article
Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences
K. Arthur Endsley, John S. Kimball, Rolf H. Reichle
Summary: In the northern hemisphere, terrestrial ecosystems transition from CO2 sources in winter to carbon sinks in spring. A phase bias in seasonal cycles of ecosystem respiration (RECO) and net ecosystem exchange (NEE) estimated by a carbon flux model framework is diagnosed, and its link to soil respiration mechanisms is investigated. Proposed modifications to the model include the inhibition of foliar respiration in the light, a seasonally varying litterfall phenology, an O-2 diffusion limitation on heterotrophic respiration, and a vertically resolved soil decomposition model. Applying these enhancements improves the skill of RECO and NEE estimations compared to in situ observations.
JOURNAL OF ADVANCES IN MODELING EARTH SYSTEMS
(2022)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Wen-Ping Tsai, Dapeng Feng, Ming Pan, Hylke Beck, Kathryn Lawson, Yuan Yang, Jiangtao Liu, Chaopeng Shen
Summary: This study introduces a novel differentiable parameter learning framework that efficiently learns a global mapping between inputs and parameters, demonstrating improved model performance and generalizability with significantly lower computational cost. Through examples in soil moisture and streamflow, the method outperforms existing approaches and requires only a fraction of the training data to achieve similar performance.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
(2021)
Article
Ecology
Josue Delgado-Balbuena, Henry W. Loescher, Carlos A. Aguirre-Gutierrez, Teresa Alfaro-Reyna, Luis F. Pineda-Martinez, Rodrigo Vargas, Tulio Arredondo
Summary: Semiarid grasslands are characterized by infrequent and small precipitation events, and plants and soil microorganisms have adapted to utilize these small pulses of water. Previous studies have shown that short-term responses of carbon and nitrogen mineralization rates are stimulated by wet-dry cycles, but the long-term dynamics, drivers, and contribution to the annual carbon balance are poorly understood. This study analyzed 6 years of continuous net ecosystem exchange measurements and found that changes in precipitation periodicity and magnitude significantly affect the daily and annual net ecosystem carbon exchange in semiarid grasslands. The results suggest that long-term changes in precipitation patterns due to climate change can potentially convert semiarid grasslands from carbon sinks to carbon sources.
Article
Ecology
Hongxing He, Laura Clark, Oi Yin Lai, Rachel Kendall, Ian Strachan, Nigel T. Roulet
Summary: When peat is extracted for horticultural use, it leads to significant changes in carbon, water, and energy exchanges of the peatland, resulting in a shift from a carbon sink to a large source of CO2. Using the CoupModel, researchers simulated soil CO2 emissions and the associated abiotic drivers at a horticultural peat extraction site in Quebec, Canada. The model accurately reproduced measured data on soil moisture, temperature, water table depth, and CO2 emissions. The results have implications for reporting emissions from the horticultural peat extraction industry and guiding climate-smart management practices.
Article
Forestry
Xingkai Xu, Tingting Xu, Jin Yue
Summary: Global warming has a significant impact on soil carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) fluxes in temperate forests, especially during the non-growing season and throughout the year. Field observations and experiments showed that changes in temperature have a noticeable effect on soil CO2 and CH4 fluxes in temperate forests, with a more pronounced effect observed in temperature elevation simulations.
Article
Ecology
Aijun Xing, Enzai Du, Haihua Shen, Longchao Xu, Wim de Vries, Mengying Zhao, Xiuyuan Liu, Jingyun Fang
Summary: Long-term experimental nitrogen additions stimulated net primary production but the effect decreased with increasing nitrogen loads. The impact on soil heterotrophic respiration shifted from stimulation at low levels of nitrogen additions to inhibition at higher levels. Overall, nitrogen additions had a nonlinear temporal response on net ecosystem productivity.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Juan Nathaniel, Jiangong Liu, Pierre Gentine
Summary: We provide a global, long-term carbon flux dataset called MetaFlux, which is generated using meta-learning to efficiently learn and infer carbon fluxes. By utilizing meta-trained ensemble of deep models, we are able to generate daily and monthly carbon products at a high spatial resolution from 2001 to 2021. The MetaFlux ensembles have lower validation error and are more robust to extreme observations compared to their non-meta-trained counterparts. Additionally, the MetaFlux outperforms other machine-learning based carbon products, especially in the tropics and semi-arid regions.
Article
Ecology
Johannes Ingrisch, Nikolaus Umlauf, Michael Bahn
Summary: The ecological consequences of future droughts are difficult to predict due to limited understanding of plant responses to increasing drought intensity, which can change abruptly at critical thresholds. This study demonstrates that drought intensity has nonlinear effects on plant resistance and recovery, and these effects are dependent on specific thresholds of stress intensity.
Article
Computer Science, Theory & Methods
Paula Olaya, Dominic Kennedy, Ricardo Llamas, Leobardo Valera, Rodrigo Vargas, Jay Lofstead, Michela Taufer
Summary: This paper proposes a computational environment that automatically creates a record of workflow execution and attaches it invisibly to the workflow's output, enabling data traceability and results explainability. By running the workflow in this environment, different accuracy measurements of predicted soil moisture values at different resolutions can be identified and linked to different machine learning methods used during the soil moisture downscaling, without requiring scientists to know the aspects of workflow design and implementation.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
(2023)
Article
Ecology
Martha L. Vargas-Terminel, Julio C. Rodriguez, Enrico A. Yepez, Carlos A. Robles-Zazueta, Christopher Watts, Jaime Garatuza-Payan, Rodrigo Vargas, Zulia M. Sanchez-Mejia
Summary: This study finds that anthropogenic activities can significantly impact the carbon sink potential of mangrove wetlands, as observed in two sites in northwest Mexico.
JOURNAL OF ARID ENVIRONMENTS
(2023)
Article
Environmental Sciences
Max A. A. Schuchardt, Bernd J. J. Berauer, Justyna Giejsztowt, Andreas V. V. Hessberg, Yujie Niu, Michael Bahn, Anke Jentsch
Summary: Warming in mountain regions is projected to occur three times faster than the global average. Observational studies have shown species loss and colonization by novel species in mountain plant communities due to climatic change. This study monitored translocated mountain plant communities and found increasing species turnover and colonization by novel species under two future climate scenarios. The colonization of novel species is facilitated by direct environmental filtering, which is affected by interacting climate stressors. The study provides experimental evidence of local species loss in mountain plant communities and reveals abrupt threshold dynamics.
ARCTIC ANTARCTIC AND ALPINE RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Environmental Sciences
Sean Fettrow, Rodrigo Vargas, Angelia L. Seyfferth
Summary: The impact of sea level rise on carbon dynamics in tidal salt marsh soils remains unresolved. This study demonstrates that increasing sea level leads to an increase in lateral dissolved organic carbon (DOC) export, as a result of reductive dissolution of carbon-bearing iron (Fe) oxides. However, the overall global warming potential (GWP) decreases under sea level rise due to suppressed CO2 emissions from the soil.
Article
Plant Sciences
Natalie J. Oram, Johannes Ingrisch, Richard D. Bardgett, Fiona Brennan, Georg Dittmann, Gerd Gleixner, Paul Illmer, Nadine Praeg, Michael Bahn
Summary: Grasslands face increasing drought intensity, but their response to it is unclear. This study investigated the effects of drought intensity on plant productivity, plant-soil carbon and nitrogen cycling. The results showed that slow-strategy plant communities were more drought resistant and had higher productivity thresholds compared to fast-strategy communities. Increasing past drought intensity resulted in greater microbial uptake of recent plant-assimilated carbon and increased soil nitrogen availability. The recovery responses of plant communities varied depending on their strategies, with the fast-strategy community exhibiting greater compensatory growth and the slow community allocating more carbon to microbial biomass.
JOURNAL OF ECOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Agronomy
Alma Vazquez-Lule, Rodrigo Vargas
Summary: Salt marshes are highly productive ecosystems for Blue Carbon assessments. However, there is limited information on estimating gross primary productivity (GPP) using proximal remote sensing (PRS). This study combined multi-annual PRS data with GPP derived from eddy covariance to predict GPP using different vegetation indices (VIs) and reflectance from various electromagnetic spectrum areas. The results showed that hyperspectral data and PhenoCam indices have a strong relationship with GPP. The visible-infrared electromagnetic region coupled with a partial least square approach (PLSR) showed the highest data-model agreement with GPP. Canopy phenological phases pose challenges for modeling GPP using VIs and the PLSR approach.
AGRICULTURAL AND FOREST METEOROLOGY
(2023)
Article
Soil Science
Aaron N. Koop, Daniel R. Hirmas, Sharon A. Billings, Li Li, Alejandro Cueva, Xi Zhang, Hang Wen, Attila Nemes, Ligia F. T. Souza, Hoori Ajami, Alejandro N. Flores, Aoesta K. Rudick, Annalise Guthrie, Lola M. Klamm, Micah Unruh, Pamela L. Sullivan
Summary: Climate-induced soil structural changes are occurring rapidly at yearly to decadal timescales, making it important to understand the properties and mechanisms controlling soil structure and macroporosity. This study shows that the complexed fraction of soil organic carbon and clay strongly influence effective porosity in both surface and subsurface horizons. The relationship between effective porosity and complexed organic carbon and clay can help predict future changes in soil hydraulic properties.
Article
Biodiversity Conservation
Kathiravan Meeran, Niel Verbrigghe, Johannes Ingrisch, Lucia Fuchslueger, Lena Mueller, Pall Sigurosson, Bjarni D. Sigurdsson, Herbert Wachter, Margarete Watzka, Jennifer L. Soong, Sara Vicca, Ivan A. Janssens, Michael Bahn
Summary: Climate warming in high latitude grasslands may cause significant carbon losses from soil. The effects of warming and nitrogen availability on belowground carbon dynamics and the fate of recently photosynthesized carbon are not well understood. In an Icelandic study, soil warming increased ecosystem respiration and resulted in net CO2 emissions. Surprisingly, plants in warmed soil were nitrogen limited, reducing primary productivity and decreasing recently assimilated carbon. Microbes in the soil became increasingly carbon limited under warming and had increased microbial uptake of recent carbon. The findings suggest that warming induced nitrogen and carbon limitations, reducing CO2 uptake and accelerating the release of photosynthesized carbon, thereby decreasing carbon sequestration potential in grasslands. The study highlights the importance of belowground carbon allocation and carbon-nitrogen interactions in subarctic ecosystems in a warmer world.
GLOBAL CHANGE BIOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Ecology
Max A. A. Schuchardt, Bernd J. J. Berauer, Anh Le Duc, Johannes Ingrisch, Yujie Niu, Michael Bahn, Anke Jentsch
Summary: Warming in mountain regions is projected to be three times faster than the global average. Pronounced climate change will likely lead to species reshuffling in mountain plant communities and consequently change ecosystem resilience and functioning. Yet, little is known about the role of inter- versus intraspecific changes of plant traits and their consequences for functional richness and evenness of mountain plant communities under climate change.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Ulisse Gomarasca, Mirco Migliavacca, Jens Kattge, Jacob A. Nelson, Uelo Niinemets, Christian Wirth, Alessandro Cescatti, Michael Bahn, Richard Nair, Alicia T. R. Acosta, M. Altaf Arain, Mirela Beloiu, T. Andrew Black, Hans Henrik Bruun, Solveig Franziska Bucher, Nina Buchmann, Chaeho Byun, Arnaud Carrara, Adriano Conte, Ana C. da Silva, Gregory Duveiller, Silvano Fares, Andreas Ibrom, Alexander Knohl, Benjamin Komac, Jean-Marc Limousin, Christopher H. Lusk, Miguel D. Mahecha, David Martini, Vanessa Minden, Leonardo Montagnani, Akira S. Mori, Yusuke Onoda, Josep Penuelas, Oscar Perez-Priego, Peter Poschlod, Thomas L. Powell, Peter B. Reich, Ladislav Sigut, Peter M. van Bodegom, Sophia Walther, Georg Wohlfahrt, Ian J. Wright, Markus Reichstein
Summary: Trait correlation patterns predicted by leaf- and plant-level coordination theories are observed between community mean traits and ecosystem processes, suggesting a propagation of trade-offs to the ecosystem level. This finding emphasizes the importance of evaluating the coordination of ecosystem functional properties for developing more realistic global dynamic vegetation models with empirical data.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
(2023)
Article
Ecology
Josue Delgado-Balbuena, Henry W. Loescher, Carlos A. Aguirre-Gutierrez, Teresa Alfaro-Reyna, Luis F. Pineda-Martinez, Rodrigo Vargas, Tulio Arredondo
Summary: Semiarid grasslands are characterized by infrequent and small precipitation events, and plants and soil microorganisms have adapted to utilize these small pulses of water. Previous studies have shown that short-term responses of carbon and nitrogen mineralization rates are stimulated by wet-dry cycles, but the long-term dynamics, drivers, and contribution to the annual carbon balance are poorly understood. This study analyzed 6 years of continuous net ecosystem exchange measurements and found that changes in precipitation periodicity and magnitude significantly affect the daily and annual net ecosystem carbon exchange in semiarid grasslands. The results suggest that long-term changes in precipitation patterns due to climate change can potentially convert semiarid grasslands from carbon sinks to carbon sources.
Article
Geosciences, Multidisciplinary
Daphne Armas, Mario Guevara, Fernando Bezares, Rodrigo Vargas, Pilar Durante, Victor Osorio, Wilmer Jimenez, Cecilio Oyonarte
Summary: Ecuador has established a new soil database that harmonizes soil data from various sources and ensures information accuracy and accessibility. The database includes 13,542 soil profiles and 51,713 measured soil horizons, covering 92 different soil variables. It fills the gaps in soil information in Ecuador and enhances the national representativeness of soil information.
EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE DATA
(2023)
Article
Ecology
Rodrigo Vargas, Van Huong Le
Summary: Quantifying the role of soils in nature-based solutions requires accurate estimates of soil greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes. Continuous measurements provide more reliable information on statistical properties, temporal dependence, annual budgets, and associated uncertainty compared to measurements done at fixed intervals. A novel approach, temporal univariate Latin hypercube sampling, can be used to optimize monitoring efforts of GHG fluxes across time and reduce bias and uncertainty. These findings have implications for assessing GHG fluxes from soils and reducing uncertainty in the role of soils in nature-based solutions.
Review
Ecology
Sheel Bansal, Irena F. Creed, Brian A. Tangen, Scott D. Bridgham, Ankur R. Desai, Ken W. Krauss, Scott C. Neubauer, Gregory B. Noe, Donald O. Rosenberry, Carl Trettin, Kimberly P. Wickland, Scott T. Allen, Ariane Arias-Ortiz, Anna R. Armitage, Dennis Baldocchi, Kakoli Banerjee, David Bastviken, Peter Berg, Matthew J. Bogard, Alex T. Chow, William H. Conner, Christopher Craft, Courtney Creamer, Tonya Delsontro, Jamie A. Duberstein, Meagan Eagle, M. Siobhan Fennessy, Sarah A. Finkelstein, Mathias Goeckede, Sabine Grunwald, Meghan Halabisky, Ellen Herbert, Mohammad M. R. Jahangir, Olivia F. Johnson, Miriam C. Jones, Jeffrey J. Kelleway, Sara Knox, Kevin D. Kroeger, Kevin A. Kuehn, David Lobb, Amanda L. Loder, Shizhou Ma, Damien T. Maher, Gavin McNicol, Jacob Meier, Beth A. Middleton, Christopher Mills, Purbasha Mistry, Abhijit Mitra, Courtney Mobilian, Amanda M. Nahlik, Sue Newman, Jessica L. O'Connell, Patty Oikawa, Max Post van der Burg, Charles A. Schutte, Changchun Song, Camille L. Stagg, Jessica Turner, Rodrigo Vargas, Mark P. Waldrop, Marcus B. Wallin, Zhaohui Aleck Wang, Eric J. Ward, Debra A. Willard, Stephanie Yarwood, Xiaoyan Zhu
Summary: Wetlands have a significant impact on global carbon sequestration, CO2 and methane emissions, and aquatic carbon fluxes. However, measuring wetland carbon is challenging due to the complexity and dynamism of the underlying biogeochemical processes. This review summarizes common and cutting-edge approaches for quantifying wetland carbon pools and fluxes, providing insights into measurement components, spatial and temporal representation, implementation considerations, and ancillary measurements.
