Biotic carbon feedbacks in a materially-closed soil-vegetation-atmosphere system

Milcu, A., Lukac, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8535-6334, Subke, J., Manning, P., Heinemeyer, A., Wildman, D., Anderson, R. and Ineson, P. (2012) Biotic carbon feedbacks in a materially-closed soil-vegetation-atmosphere system. Nature Climate Change (2). pp. 281-284. ISSN 1758-678X doi: 10.1038/nclimate1448

Abstract/Summary

The magnitude and direction of the coupled feedbacks between the biotic and abiotic components of the terrestrial carbon cycle is a major source of uncertainty in coupled climate–carbon-cycle models1, 2, 3. Materially closed, energetically open biological systems continuously and simultaneously allow the two-way feedback loop between the biotic and abiotic components to take place4, 5, 6, 7, but so far have not been used to their full potential in ecological research, owing to the challenge of achieving sustainable model systems6, 7. We show that using materially closed soil–vegetation–atmosphere systems with pro rata carbon amounts for the main terrestrial carbon pools enables the establishment of conditions that balance plant carbon assimilation, and autotrophic and heterotrophic respiration fluxes over periods suitable to investigate short-term biotic carbon feedbacks. Using this approach, we tested an alternative way of assessing the impact of increased CO2 and temperature on biotic carbon feedbacks. The results show that without nutrient and water limitations, the short-term biotic responses could potentially buffer a temperature increase of 2.3 °C without significant positive feedbacks to atmospheric CO2. We argue that such closed-system research represents an important test-bed platform for model validation and parameterization of plant and soil biotic responses to environmental changes.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/25993
Identification Number/DOI	10.1038/nclimate1448
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Life Sciences > School of Agriculture, Policy and Development > Department of Crop Science Interdisciplinary centres and themes > Soil Research Centre
Uncontrolled Keywords	biotic feedbacks, atmospheric CO2, climate change, CO2 fertilisation, closed ecological systems
Publisher	Nature Publishing Group
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