title: Quantifying global soil carbon losses in response to warming.
abstract: The majority of the Earth's terrestrial carbon is stored in the soil. If anthropogenic warming stimulates the loss of this carbon to the atmosphere, it could drive further planetary warming. Despite evidence that warming enhances carbon fluxes to and from the soil, the net global balance between these responses remains uncertain. Here we present a comprehensive analysis of warming-induced changes in soil carbon stocks by assembling data from 49 field experiments located across North America, Europe and Asia. We find that the effects of warming are contingent on the size of the initial soil carbon stock, with considerable losses occurring in high-latitude areas. By extrapolating this empirical relationship to the global scale, we provide estimates of soil carbon sensitivity to warming that may help to constrain Earth system model projections. Our empirical relationship suggests that global soil carbon stocks in the upper soil horizons will fall by 30 ± 30 petagrams of carbon to 203 ± 161 petagrams of carbon under one degree of warming, depending on the rate at which the effects of warming are realized. Under the conservative assumption that the response of soil carbon to warming occurs within a year, a business-as-usual climate scenario would drive the loss of 55 ± 50 petagrams of carbon from the upper soil horizons by 2050. This value is around 12-17 per cent of the expected anthropogenic emissions over this period. Despite the considerable uncertainty in our estimates, the direction of the global soil carbon response is consistent across all scenarios. This provides strong empirical support for the idea that rising temperatures will stimulate the net loss of soil carbon to the atmosphere, driving a positive land carbon-climate feedback that could accelerate climate change.
authors.affiliation: Netherlands Institute of Ecology, Droevendaalsesteeg 10, 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands.|Yale School of Forestry &Environmental Studies, Yale University, 370 Prospect Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA.
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authors.affiliation: Yale School of Forestry &Environmental Studies, Yale University, 370 Prospect Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA.
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authors.affiliation: Netherlands Institute of Ecology, Droevendaalsesteeg 10, 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands.|Laboratory of Nematology, Wageningen University, Droevendaalsesteeg 1, 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands.
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authors.affiliation: Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, No. 46 Zhongguancun South Street, Beijing 100081, China.
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authors.affiliation: Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University, Penrith, 2570 New South Wales, Australia.
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authors.affiliation: Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Environment Centre Wales, Deiniol Road, Bangor LL57 2UW, UK.
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authors.affiliation: Netherlands Institute of Ecology, Droevendaalsesteeg 10, 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands.|Yale School of Forestry &Environmental Studies, Yale University, 370 Prospect Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA.
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mesh_terms: D001272:Atmosphere / Q000737:chemistry*; D002244:Carbon / Q000032:analysis*; D057486:Carbon Cycle; D016208:Databases, Factual; D017753:Ecosystem; D005246:Feedback; D005843:Geography; D057232:Global Warming; D015233:Models, Statistical; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012987:Soil / Q000737:chemistry*; D013696:Temperature
chemical_list: D012987:Soil; D002244:Carbon