Identification

Title

Fire decline in dry tropical ecosystems enhances decadal land carbon sink

Abstract

The terrestrial carbon sink has significantly increased in the past decades, but the underlying mechanisms are still unclear. The current synthesis of process-based estimates of land and ocean sinks requires an additional sink of 0.6PgC yr(-1) in the last decade to explain the observed airborne fraction. A concurrent global fire decline was observed in association with tropical agriculture expansion and landscape fragmentation. Here we show that a decline of 0.20.1PgC yr(-1) in fire emissions during 2008-2014 relative to 2001-2007 also induced an additional carbon sink enhancement of 0.4 +/- 0.2PgC yr(-1) attributable to carbon cycle feedbacks, amounting to a combined sink increase comparable to the 0.6PgC yr(-1) budget imbalance. Our results suggest that the indirect effects of fire, in addition to the direct emissions, is an overlooked mechanism for explaining decadal-scale changes in the land carbon sink and highlight the importance of fire management in climate mitigation. p id=Par In recent history the amount of carbon captured by terrestrial systems has increased, but the processes driving this process has remained poorly constrained. Here the authors use a global carbon model to show that a decrease in wildfires has caused the land carbon sink to increase in the past few decades.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d76t0qzh

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2020-12-20T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact