Sensitivity of the carbon storage of potential vegetation to historical climate variability and CO2 in continental China

Jiafu Mao, Bin Wang, Yongjiu Dai

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7 Scopus citations

Abstract

The interest in the national levels of the terrestrial carbon sink and its spatial and temporal variability with the climate and CO2 concentrations has been increasing. How the climate and the increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations in the last century affect the carbon storage in continental China was investigated in this study by using the Modified Sheffield Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (M-SDGVM). The estimates of the M-SDGVM indicated that during the past 100 years a combination of increasing CO2 with historical temperature and precipitation variability in continental China have caused the total vegetation carbon storage to increase by 2.04 Pg C, with 2.07 Pg C gained in the vegetation biomass but 0.03 Pg C lost from the organic soil carbon matter. The increasing CO2 concentration in the 20th century is primarily responsible for the increase of the total potential vegetation carbon. These factorial experiments show that temperature variability alone decreases the total carbon storage by 1.36 Pg C and precipitation variability alone causes a loss of 1.99 Pg C. The effect of the increasing CO2 concentration alone increased the total carbon storage in the potential vegetation of China by 3.22 Pg C over the past 100 years. With the changing of the climate, the CO2 fertilization on China's ecosystems is the result of the enhanced net biome production (NBP), which is caused by a greater stimulation of the gross primary production (GPP) than the total soil-vegetation respiration. Our study also shows notable interannual and decadal variations in the net carbon exchange between the atmosphere and terrestrial ecosystems in China due to the historical climate variability.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)87-100
Number of pages14
JournalAdvances in Atmospheric Sciences
Volume26
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Externally publishedYes

Funding

Acknowledgements. The first author is very grateful for the help on modifications and applications of SDGVM by Prof. F. Ian Woodward and Dr. Mark Lomas from the Sheffield University, UK. This paper is partly supported by the China Meteorological Administration through Grant GYHY (QX) 2007-25, the 973 project under Grant 2005CB321703, the Fund for Innovative Research Groups under Grant No. 40221503 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) project under Grant No. 40225013.

Keywords

  • CO fertilization
  • China
  • Climate-vegetation interaction
  • Dynamic global vegetation models
  • Terrestrial carbon storage

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