A Chapman University researcher and his coworkers have discovered how the Earth reacts as it warms due to climate change.
Joshua Fisher. Image Credit: Chapman University
According to scientists, a warming world necessitates a unique method of sensing how much carbon dioxide escapes ecosystems when temperatures change, which reveals how well plants and soil can mitigate damage by removing carbon pollution from the atmosphere. The study is the first to discover a relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide release at the landscape level.
The research was published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
According to Joshua Fisher, a Climate Scientist and Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at Chapman University’s Schmid College of Science and Technology, plants that currently take up a quarter to a third of humanity's carbon emissions may not be able to maintain the rate of carbon dioxide removal.
A big unknown in the future of the Earth is how ecosystems will respond to increasing temperature. Our findings give us insight into the fate of the planet, and how we can measure those changes at large scales.
Joshua Fisher, Climate Scientist and Associate Professor, Environmental Science and Policy Schmid College of Science and Technology, Chapman University
Recent advances, including Fisher’s, have resulted in the use of satellites to track global photosynthetic activity and quantify gas concentrations in plants and ground soil; however, similar tools have been unable to track respiration, or the “breathing” out of carbon dioxide, across biomes and continents.
Respiration remains indirectly interpreted as the difference between photosynthesis and the overall change in carbon dioxide, and “the spot measurements are not representative of the larger landscape,” Fisher notes.
As a result, he and other researchers set up monitoring stations in the trees. A network of dozens of monitoring stations on towers across North America took new carbon dioxide measurements. The findings provided valuable insight into future measurements over larger swaths of land.
When they likened landscape measurements from tower stations to ground measurements, they discovered an overly sensitive relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature that does not exist when searching at the larger landscape.
Ground measurements said there’s a lot of CO2 emission for small changes in temperature; but the landscape measurements said there’s not a lot of CO2 emission for small changes in temperature.
Joshua Fisher, Climate Scientist and Associate Professor, Environmental Science and Policy Schmid College of Science and Technology, Chapman University
Later, the team updated the mathematical models used to predict the relationships using the findings, and they discovered that when these models were improved using the findings, they performed better.
This is a very clever study that harnessed a myriad of measurements, models, and understanding of how they synergize together. Our results continue to march us forward in deeper understanding of the Earth and what it may mean if we continue to change its climate.
Joshua Fisher, Climate Scientist and Associate Professor, Environmental Science and Policy Schmid College of Science and Technology, Chapman University
The research was supported by the NASA Terrestrial Ecology Interdisciplinary Science and Carbon Monitoring System, the Carnegie Institution for Science’s endowment, Singapore’s Ministry of Education, the RUBISCO SFA, which is sponsored by the Regional and Global Model Analysis Program in the Climate and Environmental Sciences Division of the Office of Biological and Environmental Research in the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, and NASA.
Journal Reference:
Sun, W., et al. (2023). Biome-scale temperature sensitivity of ecosystem respiration revealed by atmospheric CO2 observations. Nature Ecology & Evolution. doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02093-x.