Abstract
Plants invest a considerable amount of leaf nitrogen in the photosynthetic enzyme ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase-oxygenase (RuBisCO), forming a strong coupling of nitrogen and photosynthetic capacity. Variability in the nitrogen-photosynthesis relationship indicates different nitrogen use strategies of plants (i.e., the fraction nitrogen allocated to RuBisCO; fLNR), however, the reason for this remains unclear as widely different nitrogen use strategies are adopted in photosynthesis models. Here, we use a comprehensive database of in situ observations, a remote sensing product of leaf chlorophyll and ancillary climate and soil data, to examine the global distribution in fLNR using a random forest model. We find global fLNR is 18.2 ± 6.2%, with its variation largely driven by negative dependence on leaf mass per area and positive dependence on leaf phosphorus. Some climate and soil factors (i.e., light, atmospheric dryness, soil pH, and sand) have considerable positive influences on fLNR regionally. This study provides insight into the nitrogen-photosynthesis relationship of plants globally and an improved understanding of the global distribution of photosynthetic potential.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 4866 |
| Journal | Nature Communications |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 1 2021 |
Funding
X.L. and T.F.K. were supported by the NASA Terrestrial Ecology Program IDS Award NNH17AE86I. X.L. acknowledges support from the National University of Singapore. T.F.K. also acknowledges support by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research of the US Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC02-05CH11231 as part of the RUBISCO SFA. N.G.S. acknowledges support from Texas Tech University. C.X. acknowledges support from the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment (NGEE) in the tropics, sponsored by the DOE Office of Science. H.C. was supported by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Future Leaders Fellowship scheme [MR/T01993X/1]. I. C.P. has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No: 787203 REALM). We thank the TRY database for making its data publicly available. We thank Dr. Ethan Butler for making their global leaf traits map publicly available. ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the DOE under contract DE-AC05-1008 00OR22725. This manuscript has been co-authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).