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Project

Are terrestrial carbon cycle responses to climate change governed by soil properties and microbial symbionts?

The fate of the land carbon (C) sink is a major source of uncertainty in climate change projections. This uncertainty originates to a considerable degree from difficulties in estimating ecosystem responses to climate change itself, which depend on multiple factors. While moderating roles of for example ecosystem type and background climate are understood and accounted for in models, much less is known on how soil properties, resource availability and microbial symbionts influence global-scale responses to warming and precipitation change. I hypothesize that these soil-related factors explain to a significant degree why climate change responses vary so much, given their known role in determining ecosystem function. By using complementary benefits of ongoing, distributed climate change experiments and meta-analyses on a database I and international colleagues collaborated on, I aim to unravel global-scale patterns as well as in-depth mechanisms underlying soils' and symbionts' role in determining climate change responses. Using a novel approach to quantify nutrient availability, I here for the first time also plan to assess how climate change responses vary along resource availability gradients vs manipulations. Finally, I will evaluate if current land surface models realistically simulate soil/symbiont-dependent tradeoffs among C cycle pool and flux responses to climate change. Based on the findings, the project will contribute to more realistic projections of the land C sink.
Date:1 Nov 2022 →  Today
Keywords:TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEM, CARBON CYCLE, CLIMATE CHANGE
Disciplines:Global ecology, Terrestrial ecology, Plant ecology
Project type:Collaboration project