A plateau scale soil moisture and soil temperature observatory is established on the Tibetan Plateau for quantifying uncertainties in coarse resolution satellite and model products of soil moisture and soil temperature. The Tibetan Plateau observatory of plateau scale soil moisture and soil temperature (Tibet-Obs) consists of three regional scale insitu reference networks, including the Naqu ne...

Society relies on Earth system models (ESMs) to project future climate and carbon cycle feedbacks. However, the soil C response to climate change is highly uncertain in these models1,2 and they omit key biogeochemical mechanisms3–5. Specifically, the traditional approach in ESMs lacks direct microbial control over soil C dynamics6–8. Thus, we tested a new model that explicitly represents microb...

Northern Hemisphere permafrost affected land areas contain about twice as much carbon as the global atmosphere. This vast carbon pool is vulnerable to accelerated losses through mobilization and decomposition under projected global warming. Satellite data records spanning the past 3 decades indicate widespread reductions (∼ 0.8– 1.3 days decade) in the mean annual snow cover extent and frozen-s...

Tropical forests play an important role in regulating the global climate and the carbon cycle. With the changing temperature and moisture along the elevation gradient, the Luquillo Experimental Forest in Northeastern Puerto Rico provides a natural approach to understand tropical forest ecosystems under climate change. In this study, we conducted a soil translocation experiment along an elevatio...

Soil is one of the most important carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) pools and plays a crucial role in ecosystem C and N cycling. Climate change profoundly affects soil C and N storage via changing C and N inputs and outputs. However, the influences of climate warming and changing precipitation regime on labile and recalcitrant fractions of soil organic C and N remain unclear. Here, we investigated so...

This article analyzes geo-referenced data to elucidate the relations between deforestation and access to roads and markets, attributes of the physical environment, land tenure, and zoning policies in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. It presents separate models for Santa Cruz as a whole and for seven different zones within Santa Cruz, as well as for two different time periods (pre-1989 and 1989 to 1994). Th...

Thomas Malthus, in his ‘Essay on Population’ in 1798, argued that food production would not be able to keep pace with our capacity to produce. Contrary to this prediction there seems to be no evidence that our ability to produce food has been a lasting break on population growth. There are, however, several major areas of concern regarding environmental degradation associated with production ha...

Metabolic profiling can be used to assess the changes in biochemical profiles of soil communities living in contaminated sites. The term "community metabolomics" is proposed for the application of metabolomics techniques to the study of the entire community of a soil sample. The authors anticipate the present study to be a starting point for the use of this technique to assess how communities r...

Previous studies have concluded that boreal forests warm the climate because the cooling from storage of carbon in vegetation and soils is cancelled out by the warming due to the absorption of the Sun's heat by the dark forest canopy. However, these studies ignored the impacts of forests on atmospheric aerosol. We use a global atmospheric model to show that, through emission of organic vapours ...

The Deciduous Complex that occurs in northern Minas Gerais State, Brazil, raises questions about the floristic affinities of these formations in relation to neighboring phytogeographical domains. Little is known about the identity of the seasonal forest formations that comprise this complex, or about its relationships to abiotic components, such as soils, topography and climate. This study aime...