I build a model that explains Midwestern US maize and soybean yield as a function of weather and soil capability. Climate change is expected to reduce mid-century maize and soybean yields in the Midwest by 8% to 28% and 7% to 23%, respectively, depending on cropped land’s soil capability and severity of climate change, compared to baseline values calculated with no climate change. I find that s...

The equilibrium carbon storage capacity of the terrestrial biosphere has been investigated by running the Lund-Potsdam-Jena Dynamic Global Vegetation Model to equilibrium for a range of CO2 concentrations and idealized climate states. Local climate is defined by the combination of an observation-based climatology and perturbation patterns derived from a 4×CO2 warming simulations, which are line...

Soil carbon dioxide (CO2) emission is one of the largest fluxes in the global carbon cycle. Therefore small changes in the size of this flux can have a large effect on atmospheric CO2 concentrations and potentially constitute a powerful positive feedback to the climate system. Soil CO2 fluxes in the alpine steppe ecosystem of Northern Tibet and their responses to short-term experimental warming...

Using plants to extract excess nitrate from soil is important in protecting against eutrophication of standing water, hypoxic conditions in lakes and oceans, or elevated nitrate concentrations in domestic water supplies Global climate change issues have raised new concerns about nitrogen (N) management as it relates to crop production even though there may not be an immediate threat to water qu...

Soil microbes play critical roles in regulating terrestrial carbon (C) cycle and its feedback to climate change. However, it is still unclear how the soil microbial community and abundance respond to future climate change scenarios. In this meta-analysis, we synthesized the responses of microbial community and abundance to experimental warming from 64 published field studies. Our results showed...

The probabilistic response of depth-integrated soil water to given climatic forcing can be described readily using an existing supply-demand-storage model. An apparently complex interaction of numerous soil, climate, and plant controls can be reduced to a relatively simple expression for the equilibrium probability density function of soil water as a function of only two dimensionless parameter...

Geographic patterns in leaf stoichiometry reflect plant adaptations to environments. Leaf stoichiometry variations along environmental gradients have been extensively studied among terrestrial plants, but little has been known about intraspecific leaf stoichiometry, especially for wetland plants. Here we analyzed the dataset of leaf N and P of a cosmopolitan wetland species, Phragmites australi...

The Mediterranean region is particularly prone to erosion. This is because it is subject to long dry periods followed by heavy bursts of erosive rainfall, falling on steep slopes with fragile soils, resulting in considerable amounts of erosion. In parts of the Mediterranean region, erosion has reached a stage of irreversibility and in some places erosion has practically ceased because there is ...

Goal To determine the relative importance of different mechanisms that influence carbon loss from soil under variable soil-moisture conditions. The soil contains more carbon than the atmosphere and plants combined (Scurlock and Hall 1998). This carbon is important for maintaining soil fertility, controlling erosion, and the long-term storage of carbon that could be released into the atmosphere....