Editors’ Highlights are summaries of current papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Supply: AGU Advances
The world’s oceans, forests, and soils absorb about half of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, thus moderating local weather change, however how lengthy that profit will proceed is unsure. Foresters and ecologists know that younger forests with many spindly bushes develop into mature forests with fewer, bigger bushes, in a course of referred to as “self-thinning,” which usually follows predictably fixed charges. However are self-thinning guidelines altering with local weather change and CO2 fertilization, and the way will forest biomass and carbon uptake be affected?
Marqués et al. [2023] doc mature forests of Switzerland shifting away from fixed self-thinning over the last 60 years. Mature forest biomass elevated as bushes grew quicker, however the charge of biomass improve was dampened by elevated mortality, which should be studied to know altering carbon dynamics. Future work ought to check whether or not this grow-fast-die-young speculation applies elsewhere, such because the Amazon, the place charges of carbon sequestration look like slowing or reversing.
Quotation: Marqués, L., Weng, E., Bugmann, H., Forrester, D. I., Rohner, B., Hobi, M. L., et al. (2023). Tree progress enhancement drives a persistent biomass acquire in unmanaged temperate forests. AGU Advances, 4, e2022AV000859. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022AV000859
—Eric Davidson, Editor, AGU Advances