Spatial and temporal variations in global soil respiration and their relationships with climate and land cover

Ni Huang; Li Wang; Xiao-Peng Song; T Andrew Black; Rachhpal S Jassal; Ranga B Myneni; Chaoyang Wu; Lei Wang; Wanjuan Song; Dabin Ji; Shanshan Yu; Zheng Niu

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abb8508

Spatial and temporal variations in global soil respiration and their relationships with climate and land cover

Sci Adv. 2020 Oct 7;6(41):eabb8508. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abb8508. Print 2020 Oct.

Authors

Ni Huang¹, Li Wang², Xiao-Peng Song³, T Andrew Black⁴, Rachhpal S Jassal⁴, Ranga B Myneni⁵, Chaoyang Wu⁶, Lei Wang¹, Wanjuan Song¹, Dabin Ji¹, Shanshan Yu¹, Zheng Niu^{1

7}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China. wangli@radi.ac.cn.
³ Department of Geosciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA.
⁴ Faculty of Land and Food Systems, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
⁵ Department of Earth and Environment, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA.
⁶ The Key Laboratory of Land Surface Pattern and Simulation, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
⁷ University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

Abstract

Soil respiration (R _s) represents the largest flux of CO₂ from terrestrial ecosystems to the atmosphere, but its spatial and temporal changes as well as the driving forces are not well understood. We derived a product of annual global R _s from 2000 to 2014 at 1 km by 1 km spatial resolution using remote sensing data and biome-specific statistical models. Different from the existing view that climate change dominated changes in R _s, we showed that land-cover change played a more important role in regulating R _s changes in temperate and boreal regions during 2000-2014. Significant changes in R _s occurred more frequently in areas with significant changes in short vegetation cover (i.e., all vegetation shorter than 5 m in height) than in areas with significant climate change. These results contribute to our understanding of global R _s patterns and highlight the importance of land-cover change in driving global and regional R _s changes.

Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't