Estimating carbon budgets for U.S. ecosystems

Personal Carbon Budgets for Transport

Australia’s transport greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are high and continue to grow, with current levels approximately one-third higher than in 1990 and increasing by around 1% annually. Efforts to curtail and reverse this growth have not been successful to date. In recent times, national policy development and debate has centred on market-based mechanisms to reduce GHG emissions, namely an emis...

Responses of terrestrial ecosystems and carbon budgets to current and future environmental variability.

We assess the significance of high-frequency variability of environmental parameters (sunlight, precipitation, temperature) for the structure and function of terrestrial ecosystems under current and future climate. We examine the influence of hourly, daily, and monthly variance using the Ecosystem Demography model version 2 in conjunction with the long-term record of carbon fluxes measured at H...

Soil warming, carbon-nitrogen interactions, and forest carbon budgets.

Soil warming has the potential to alter both soil and plant processes that affect carbon storage in forest ecosystems. We have quantified these effects in a large, long-term (7-y) soil-warming study in a deciduous forest in New England. Soil warming has resulted in carbon losses from the soil and stimulated carbon gains in the woody tissue of trees. The warming-enhanced decay of soil organic ma...

Regional carbon budgets at synoptic timescales

Estimating Global “Blue Carbon” Emissions from Conversion and Degradation of Vegetated Coastal Ecosystems

Recent attention has focused on the high rates of annual carbon sequestration in vegetated coastal ecosystems--marshes, mangroves, and seagrasses--that may be lost with habitat destruction ('conversion'). Relatively unappreciated, however, is that conversion of these coastal ecosystems also impacts very large pools of previously-sequestered carbon. Residing mostly in sediments, this 'blue carbo...