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Earth's Green Carbon Sink on the Wane
from Nature News
The capacity of plants to act as a carbon sink could be on the decline.
As global temperatures have risen in recent decades, the amount of atmospheric carbon being converted into plant biomass has increased in step. However, in a paper published [Thursday] in Science, ecologists Maosheng Zhao and Steve Running at the University of Montana in Missoula report a surprising reversal of this trend over the last decade, despite its having been the warmest on record.
In 2003, a study on which Running was a co-author, led by Ramakrishna Nemani, who is also at the University of Montana, reported an increase in plant productivity between 1982 and 1999. The researchers attributed that trend to a warmer climate and increased solar radiation. Zhao and Running expected to find a similar increase for 2000-2009--an expectation that was not met.
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