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Biology
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Terrestrial Ecosystem Carbon Cycling: Climate Change Impacts on Vegetation Growth
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Terrestrial Ecosystem Carbon Cycling: Climate Change Impacts on Vegetation Growth

A special issue of Biology (ISSN 2079-7737). This special issue belongs to the section "Ecology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 July 2023) | Viewed by 10277

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Tiexi Chen

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Geography and Science, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China
Interests: hydrology; water resources; remote sensing; climate change
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Jun Wang

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
International Institute for Earth System Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
Interests: terrestrial carbon cycle; dynamical global vegetation model; remote sensing; carbon assimilation; climate change; earth system model; carbon cycle-climate interaction

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In this era of rapid climate change, the carbon cycle of terrestrial ecosystems has always been an important and difficult research topic. Land and oceans absorb about half of the carbon emitted by human activities, with terrestrial ecosystems playing an important role. However, due to the spatial heterogeneity and the complexity of surface processes, the terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle is also the most uncertain part of the global carbon cycle.

The impact of climate change on vegetation has been a topic of major concern during the past two decades. This issue may seem traditional, but it is still far from being solved. The vegetation growth we focus on includes changes in both phenology and indices related to the vegetation carbon pool. The latter may include but is not limited to photosynthesis, net primary production (NPP), net ecosystem production (NEP), and others to measure the biological carbon pool.

The scope of this Special Issue is centered on climate change impacts on vegetation growth, covering multiple spatiotemporal scales from individual sites to the globe and the past to the future. The Special Issue aims to build a series of studies of climate change impacts on vegetation with clear causal and quantitative relationships.

There are two essential issues that need to be emphasized. The impacts of both climate change and human activities are always mixed together, and therefore, it is necessary to distinguish these two sources of contributions or clarify that the influence of one certain factor is almost negligible. Secondly, rather than simply monitoring the vegetation status, establishing high-quality vegetation carbon pool datasets is a challenging task. Specifically, uncertainties gradually increase in the optical vegetation index, leaf area index, photosynthesis, and subsequent series of carbon flux estimates.

Therefore, in this Special Issue, we seek to highlight the dominant role of climate change in restricting vegetation growth, including solar radiation, temperature, water availability, and elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Contributions from field experiments, remote sensing, and modeling studies are gratefully invited.

Prof. Dr. Tiexi Chen
Dr. Jun Wang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • climate change
  • terrestrial carbon cycling
  • carbon flux
  • carbon pool
  • phenology
  • canopy parameters
  • remote sensing
  • biogeochemical modeling
  • atmospheric inversions

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

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17 pages, 7246 KiB  
Article
Assessing the Effects of Human Activities on Terrestrial Net Primary Productivity of Grasslands in Typical Ecologically Fragile Areas
by Qing Huang, Fangyi Zhang, Qian Zhang, Yunxiang Jin, Xuehe Lu, Xiaoqing Li and Jia Liu
Biology 2023, 12(1), 38; https://doi.org/10.3390/biology12010038 - 25 Dec 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2192
Abstract
Global enhanced human activities have deeply influenced grassland ecosystems. Quantifying the impact of human activities on grasslands is crucial to understanding the grassland dynamic change mechanism, such as grassland degradation, and to establishing ecosystem protection measures. In this study, potential net primary productivity [...] Read more.
Global enhanced human activities have deeply influenced grassland ecosystems. Quantifying the impact of human activities on grasslands is crucial to understanding the grassland dynamic change mechanism, such as grassland degradation, and to establishing ecosystem protection measures. In this study, potential net primary productivity (PNPP), actual NPP (ANPP), and the forage harvest NPP (HNPP) were employed to establish the human activities index (HAI) to reveal the spatiotemporal changes of the effects of human activities on grassland ecosystems in eastern Inner Mongolia from 2000 to 2017, and to further explore the relationship between human activities and grassland degradation. The results showed that the total average PNPP, ANPP, and HNPP of grasslands in eastern Inner Mongolia were 187.2 Tg C yr−1, 152.3 Tg C yr−1, and 8.9 Tg C yr−1, respectively, during the period of 2000 to 2017. The HAI exhibited a clear decreasing trend during the study period, with annual mean values ranging from 0.75 to 0.47, which indicates that the NPP loss induced by human activities is weakening, and this trend is dominated by the difference between potential NPP and actual NPP. About 42.4% of the study area was non-degraded grassland, and the declining grassland degradation index (GDI) indicated that the degradation grade in eastern Inner Mongolia improved from moderate to light degradation. A positive relationship was found between HAI and GDI. This relationship was more significant in Xilingol League, which is a typical ecologically fragile area, than that in Xing’an League and Hulunbuir City. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Terrestrial Ecosystem Carbon Cycling: Climate Change Impacts on Vegetation Growth)
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16 pages, 4054 KiB  
Article
Response of Terrestrial Net Primary Production to Quadrupled CO2 Forcing: A Comparison between the CAS-ESM2 and CMIP6 Models
by Jiawen Zhu, Xiaodong Zeng, Xiaofei Gao and He Zhang
Biology 2022, 11(12), 1693; https://doi.org/10.3390/biology11121693 - 24 Nov 2022
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1717
Abstract
Terrestrial net primary production (NPP) is a key carbon flux that changes with rising atmospheric CO2 and CO2-induced climate change. Earth system models are commonly used to investigate these NPP changes because of their fundamentally trustworthy ability to simulate physical [...] Read more.
Terrestrial net primary production (NPP) is a key carbon flux that changes with rising atmospheric CO2 and CO2-induced climate change. Earth system models are commonly used to investigate these NPP changes because of their fundamentally trustworthy ability to simulate physical climate systems and terrestrial biogeochemical processes. However, many uncertainties remain in projecting NPP responses, due to their complex processes and divergent model characteristics. This study estimated NPP responses to elevated CO2 and CO2-induced climate change using the Chinese Academy of Sciences Earth System Model version 2 (CAS-ESM2), as well as 22 CMIP6 models. Based on CMIP6 pre-industrial and abruptly quadrupled CO2 experiments, the analysis focused on a comparison of the CAS-ESM2 with the multi-model ensemble (MME), and on a detection of underlying causes of their differences. We found that all of the models showed an overall enhancement in NPP, and that CAS-ESM2 projected a slightly weaker NPP enhancement than MME. This weaker NPP enhancement was the net result of much weaker NPP enhancement over the tropics, and a little stronger NPP enhancement over northern high latitudes. We further report that these differences in NPP responses between the CAS-ESM2 and MME resulted from their different behaviors in simulating NPP trends with modeling time, and are attributed to their different projections of CO2-induced climatic anomalies and different climate sensitivities. These results are favorable for understanding and further improving the performance of the CAS-ESM2 in projecting the terrestrial carbon cycle, and point towards a need for greater understanding and improvements for both physical climatic processes and the terrestrial carbon cycle. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Terrestrial Ecosystem Carbon Cycling: Climate Change Impacts on Vegetation Growth)
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Review

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24 pages, 1585 KiB  
Review
Carbon Footprint Management by Agricultural Practices
by Ekrem Ozlu, Francisco Javier Arriaga, Serdar Bilen, Gafur Gozukara and Emre Babur
Biology 2022, 11(10), 1453; https://doi.org/10.3390/biology11101453 - 2 Oct 2022
Cited by 34 | Viewed by 5398
Abstract
Global attention to climate change issues, especially air temperature changes, has drastically increased over the last half-century. Along with population growth, greater surface temperature, and higher greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, there are growing concerns for ecosystem sustainability and other human existence on earth. [...] Read more.
Global attention to climate change issues, especially air temperature changes, has drastically increased over the last half-century. Along with population growth, greater surface temperature, and higher greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, there are growing concerns for ecosystem sustainability and other human existence on earth. The contribution of agriculture to GHG emissions indicates a level of 18% of total GHGs, mainly from carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O). Thus, minimizing the effects of climate change by reducing GHG emissions is crucial and can be accomplished by truly understanding the carbon footprint (CF) phenomenon. Therefore, the purposes of this study were to improve understanding of CF alteration due to agricultural management and fertility practices. CF is a popular concept in agro-environmental sciences due to its role in the environmental impact assessments related to alternative solutions and global climate change. Soil moisture content, soil temperature, porosity, and water-filled pore space are some of the soil properties directly related to GHG emissions. These properties raise the role of soil structure and soil health in the CF approach. These properties and GHG emissions are also affected by different land-use changes, soil types, and agricultural management practices. Soil management practices globally have the potential to alter atmospheric GHG emissions. Therefore, the relations between photosynthesis and GHG emissions as impacted by agricultural management practices, especially focusing on soil and related systems, must be considered. We conclude that environmental factors, land use, and agricultural practices should be considered in the management of CF when maximizing crop productivity. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Terrestrial Ecosystem Carbon Cycling: Climate Change Impacts on Vegetation Growth)
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