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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Author O’Sullivan, Michael
Friedlingstein, Pierre
Sitch, Stephen
Anthoni, Peter
Arneth, Almut
Arora, Vivek K.
Bastrikov, Vladislav
Delire, Christine
Goll, Daniel S.
Jain, Atul
Kato, Etsushi
Kennedy, Daniel
Knauer, Jürgen
Lienert, Sebastian
Lombardozzi, Danica
McGuire, Patrick C.
Melton, Joe R.
Nabel, Julia E. M. S.
Pongratz, Julia
Poulter, Benjamin
Séférian, Roland
Tian, Hanqin
Vuichard, Nicolas
Walker, Anthony P.
Yuan, Wenping
Yue, Xu
Zaehle, Sönke
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
Progress N/A
Metadata Date 2023-08-18T18:37:32.795697
Metadata Record Identifier edu.ucar.opensky::articles:25691
Metadata Language eng; USA
Suggested Citation O’Sullivan, Michael, Friedlingstein, Pierre, Sitch, Stephen, Anthoni, Peter, Arneth, Almut, Arora, Vivek K., Bastrikov, Vladislav, Delire, Christine, Goll, Daniel S., Jain, Atul, Kato, Etsushi, Kennedy, Daniel, Knauer, Jürgen, Lienert, Sebastian, Lombardozzi, Danica, McGuire, Patrick C., Melton, Joe R., Nabel, Julia E. M. S., Pongratz, Julia, Poulter, Benjamin, Séférian, Roland, Tian, Hanqin, Vuichard, Nicolas, Walker, Anthony P., Yuan, Wenping, Yue, Xu, Zaehle, Sönke. (2022). Process-oriented analysis of dominant sources of uncertainty in the land carbon sink. UCAR/NCAR - Library. http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7rn3cnq. Accessed 29 June 2025.

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