Pin Li

Increased topsoil carbon stock across China's forests.

Biomass carbon accumulation in forest ecosystems is a widespread phenomenon at both regional and global scales. However, as coupled carbon-climate models predicted, a positive feedback could be triggered if accelerated soil carbon decomposition offsets enhanced vegetation growth under a warming climate. It is thus crucial to reveal whether and how soil carbon stock in forest ecosystems has changed over recent decades. However, large-scale changes in soil carbon stock across forest ecosystems have not yet been carefully examined at both regional and global scales, which have been widely perceived as a big bottleneck in untangling carbon-climate feedback. Using newly developed database and sophisticated data mining approach, here we evaluated temporal changes in topsoil carbon stock across major forest ecosystem in China and analysed potential drivers in soil carbon dynamics over broad geographical scale. Our results indicated that topsoil carbon stock increased significantly within all of five major forest types during the period of 1980s-2000s, with an overall rate of 20.0 g C m(-2) yr(-1) (95% confidence interval, 14.1-25.5). The magnitude of soil carbon accumulation across coniferous forests and coniferous/broadleaved mixed forests exhibited meaningful increases with both mean annual temperature and precipitation. Moreover, soil carbon dynamics across these forest ecosystems were positively associated with clay content, with a larger amount of SOC accumulation occurring in fine-textured soils. In contrast, changes in soil carbon stock across broadleaved forests were insensitive to either climatic or edaphic variables. Overall, these results suggest that soil carbon accumulation does not counteract vegetation carbon sequestration across Chinas forest ecosystems. The combination of soil carbon accumulation and vegetation carbon sequestration triggers a negative feedback to climate warming, rather than a positive feedback predicted by coupled carbon-climate models.

Long‐term changes in soil pH across major forest ecosystems in China

Atmospheric acidic deposition has been a major environmental problem since the industrial revolution. However, our understanding of the effect of acidic deposition on soil pH is inconclusive. Here we examined temporal variations in topsoil pH and their relationships with atmospheric sulfur and nitrogen deposition across Chinas forests from the 1980s to the 2000s. To accomplish this goal, we conducted artificial neural network simulations using historical soil inventory data from the 1980s and a data set synthesized from literature published after 2000. Our results indicated that significant decreases in soil pH occurred in broadleaved forests, while minor changes were observed in coniferous and mixed coniferous and broadleaved forests. The magnitude of soil pH change was negatively correlated with atmospheric sulfur and nitrogen deposition. This relationship highlights the need for stringent measures that reduce sulfur and nitrogen emissions so as to maintain ecosystem structure and function.

Global patterns of ecosystem carbon flux in forests: A biometric data-based synthesis

Forest ecosystems function as a significant carbon sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, our understanding of global patterns of forest carbon fluxes remains controversial. Here we examined global patterns and environmental controls of forest carbon balance using biometric measurements derived from 243 sites and synthesized from 81 publications around the world. Our results showed that both production and respiration increased with mean annual temperature and exhibited unimodal patterns along a gradient of precipitation. However, net ecosystem production (NEP) initially increased and subsequently declined along gradients of both temperature and precipitation. Our results also indicated that ecosystem production increased during stand development but eventually leveled off, whereas respiration was significantly higher in mature and old forests than in young forests. The residual variation of carbon flux along climatic and age gradients might be explained by other factors such as atmospheric CO2 elevation and disturbances (e.g., forest fire, storm damage, and selective harvest). Heterotrophic respiration (Rh) was positively associated with net primary production (NPP), but the Rh-NPP relationship differed between natural and planted forests: Rh increased exponentially with NPP in natural forests but tended toward saturation with increased NPP in planted forests. Comparison of biometric measurements with eddy covariance observations revealed that ecosystem carbon balance derived from the latter generated higher overall NEP estimates. These results suggest that the eddy covariance observations may overestimate the strength of carbon sinks, and thus, biometric measurements need to be incorporated into global assessments of the forest carbon balance.