Plants reward microbial and animal mutualists with carbohydrates to obtain nutrients, defense, pollination, and dispersal. Under a fixed carbon budget, plants must allocate carbon to their mutualists at the expense of allocation to growth, reproduction, or storage. Such carbon trade-offs are indirectly expressed when a plant exhibits reduced growth or fecundity in the presence of its mutualist....

The retrieval of data from the Cassini-Huygens mission has revealed much about Titan's atmospheric-surface system and has precipitated more questions. One of these questions involves the lack of large reservoirs of ethane that were predicted by a variety of studies prior to the arrival of the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft. Using an updated and comprehensive photochemical model, we examine the natu...

Old-growth forests have traditionally been considered negligible as carbon sinks because carbon uptake has been thought to be balanced by respiration. We show that the top 20-centimeter soil layer in preserved old-growth forests in southern China accumulated atmospheric carbon at an unexpectedly high average rate of 0.61 megagrams of carbon hectare-1 year-1 from 1979 to 2003. This study suggest...

The national Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) program conducted a remeasurement study in 1999 to evaluate the usefulness and feasibility of collecting data needed for investigating carbon budgets in forests. This study indicated that FHM data are adequate for detecting a 20% change over 10 years (2% change per year) in percent total carbon and carbon content (MgC/ha) when sampling by horizon, wit...

The Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model is one of the most influential Assessment Models available. Its founder Professor William Nordhaus was recently awarded Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences Memory Alfred Nobel due to his pioneering work on economics climate change. In a recent paper American Journal: Policy, uses conclude that 2.5°C target almost out reach. this paper...