Using research networks to create the comprehensive datasets needed to assess nutrient availability as a key determinant of terrestrial carbon cycling

Authors: VICCA, SARA - University Of Antwerp; STOCKER, BENJAMIN - Consejo Superior De Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC); REED, SASHA - Us Geological Survey (USGS); WIEDER, WILL - National Center For Atmospheric Research (NCAR); BAHN, MICHAEL - University Of Innsbruck; Fay, Philip; JANSSENS, IVAN - University Of Antwerp; LAMBERS, HANS - University Of Western Australia; PENUELAS, JOSEP - Consejo Superior De Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC); PIAO, SHILONG - Peking University; REBEL, KARIN - Utrecht University; SARDANS, JORDI - Consejo Superior De Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC); SIGURDSSON, BJARNI - Agricultural Research Institute-Iceland; VAN SUNDERT, KEVIN - University Of Antwerp; WANG, YING-PING - Commonwealth Scientific And Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO); ZAEHLE, SONKE - Max Planck Institute For Biogeochemistry; CIAIS, PHILIPPE - Laboratoire Des Sciences Du Climat Et De L'Environnement (LSCE)

Submitted to: Environmental Research Letters
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 10/24/2018
Publication Date: 12/7/2018
Citation: Vicca, S., Stocker, B.D., Reed, S., Wieder, W., Bahn, M., Fay, P.A., Janssens, I.A., Lambers, H., Penuelas, J., Piao, S., Rebel, K.T., Sardans, J., Sigurdsson, B.D., Van Sundert, K., Wang, Y., Zaehle, S., Ciais, P. 2018. Using research networks to create the comprehensive datasets needed to assess nutrient availability as a key determinant of terrestrial carbon cycling. Environmental Research Letters. 13(12):125006. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaeae7.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaeae7

Interpretive Summary: Soil nutrients play a crucial role in the sustainability of agroecosystems. For agroecosystems based on perennial grasses, nutrient availability helps determine the amount and quality of forage available for livestock, and the ability of the system to absorb atmospheric carbon, thereby helping to buffer the ongoing increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. However, information needed to predict carbon uptake by grassland remains incomplete. Predicting the future trajectory of carbon uptake by grassland is necessary to understand how to manage grassland for optimum carbon sequestration while maintaining production capacity. This paper proposes a series of measurements of nutrient availability and proposes that distributed research networks adopt these measurements to better leverage their measurements of ecosystem carbon cycling in support of regional and global-scale carbon cycle modelling efforts.

Technical Abstract: A wide range of research shows that nutrient availability affects ecosystem structure and functioning, both directly and indirectly, and shapes ecosystem responses to environmental changes. In addition to regulating basic function, there is a central role of nutrients in determining carbon (C) cycle feedbacks to climate change. Yet, our understanding of these nutrient controls remain far from complete, and the effects of nutrient availability on C cycle responses often remain unquantified in experimental studies. Moreover, challenges remain for the representation of nutrient cycles in terrestrial carbon cycle models due to a lack of informative, comparable, and accessible datasets at regional and global scales. Today, several large-scale research networks are providing valuable data on C fluxes and stocks and are monitoring their responses to global environmental change. However, information on how nutrient cycling interacts with observed C cycle patterns is still generally lacking. We argue that the provision of coherent and comprehensive data to characterize nutrient availability in monitoring and experimental sites will greatly enhance the power of datasets resulting from C cycle observations and critically aid their interpretation, as well as our understanding of ongoing observed and simulated trends in terrestrial C cycling, and their likely future trajectory. Therefore, we propose a set of measurements to characterize nutrient availability that are relatively easy to conduct routinely at any site or experiment. A concerted, coordinated effort to collect these data across sites and experiments would allow thorough analyses of the influence of nutrient availability on terrestrial C cycling - both now and under global change - and would provide the data necessary for the development and evaluation of conceptual and numerical models of C, nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) dynamics.