Process-oriented analysis of dominant sources of uncertainty in the land carbon sink

The observed global net land carbon sink is captured by current land models. All models agree that atmospheric CO2 and nitrogen deposition driven gains in carbon stocks are partially offset by climate and land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) losses. However, there is a lack of consensus in the partitioning of the sink between vegetation and soil, where models do not even agree on the direction of change in carbon stocks over the past 60 years. This uncertainty is driven by plant productivity, allocation, and turnover response to atmospheric CO2 (and to a smaller extent to LULCC), and the response of soil to LULCC (and to a lesser extent climate). Overall, differences in turnover explain similar to 70% of model spread in both vegetation and soil carbon changes. Further analysis of internal plant and soil (individual pools) cycling is needed to reduce uncertainty in the controlling processes behind the global land carbon sink.

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Related Dataset #1 : Supplemental data of Global Carbon Project 2021

Related Dataset #2 : CCMI nitrogen surface fluxes in support of CMIP6 - version 2.0

Related Dataset #3 : TRENDYv10 DGVM output for: Process-oriented analysis of dominant sources of uncertainty in the land carbon sink
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Author O'Sullivan, M.
Friedlingstein, P.
Sitch, S.
Anthoni, P.
Arneth, A.
Arora, V. K.
Bastrikov, V.
Delire, C.
Goll, D. S.
Jain, A.
Kato, E.
Kennedy, Daniel
Knauer, J.
Lienert, S.
Lombardozzi, Danica
McGuire, P. C.
Melton, J. R.
Nabel, J. E. M. S.
Pongratz, J.
Poulter, B.
Séférian, R.
Tian, H.
Vuichard, N.
Walker, A. P.
Yuan, W.
Yue, X.
Zaehle, S.
Publisher UCAR/NCAR - Library
Publication Date 2022-08-15T00:00:00
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Not Assigned
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Resource Version N/A
Topic Category geoscientificInformation
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Metadata Date 2025-07-11T16:00:41.196528
Metadata Record Identifier edu.ucar.opensky::articles:25691
Metadata Language eng; USA
Suggested Citation O'Sullivan, M., Friedlingstein, P., Sitch, S., Anthoni, P., Arneth, A., Arora, V. K., Bastrikov, V., Delire, C., Goll, D. S., Jain, A., Kato, E., Kennedy, Daniel, Knauer, J., Lienert, S., Lombardozzi, Danica, McGuire, P. C., Melton, J. R., Nabel, J. E. M. S., Pongratz, J., Poulter, B., Séférian, R., Tian, H., Vuichard, N., Walker, A. P., Yuan, W., Yue, X., Zaehle, S.. (2022). Process-oriented analysis of dominant sources of uncertainty in the land carbon sink. UCAR/NCAR - Library. https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7rn3cnq. Accessed 01 November 2025.

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