Abstract
Climatic conditions shift gradually over millennia, altering the rates at which carbon (C) is fixed from the atmosphere and stored in the soil. However, legacy impacts of past climates on current soil C stocks are poorly understood. Weused data from more than 5000 terrestrial sites from three global and regional data sets to identify the relative importance of current and past (Last Glacial Maximum andmid-Holocene) climatic conditions in regulating soil C stocks in natural and agricultural areas. Paleoclimate always explained a greater amount of the variance in soil C stocks than current climate at regional and global scales. Our results indicate that climatic legacies help determine global soil C stocks in terrestrial ecosystems where agriculture is highly dependent on current climatic conditions. Our findings emphasize the importance of considering how climate legacies influence soil C content, allowing us to improve quantitative predictions of global C stocks under different climatic scenarios.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e1602008 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Science Advances |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Publication status | Published - Apr 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2017 The Authors.
Open Access - Access Right Statement
2017 © The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)Keywords
- agriculture
- arid regions
- carbon content
- climatic changes
- ecosystems
- soils