Whole-soil warming leads to substantial soil carbon emission in an alpine grassland

作者：Ying Chen, Wenkuan Qin, Qiufang Zhang, Xudong Wang, Jiguang Feng, Mengguang Han, Yanhui Hou, Hongyang Zhao, Zhenhua Zhang, Jin He, Margaret Torn, Biao Zhu · 发表于：Nature Communications · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1038/s41467-024-48736-w · 被引用次数：73 · 研究领域：Climate change and permafrost、Cryospheric studies and observations、Soil Carbon and Nitrogen Dynamics

Abstract The sensitivity of soil organic carbon (SOC) decomposition in seasonally frozen soils, such as alpine ecosystems, to climate warming is a major uncertainty in global carbon cycling. Here we measure soil CO 2 emission during four years (2018–2021) from the whole-soil warming experiment (4 °C for the top 1 m) in an alpine grassland ecosystem. We find that whole-soil warming stimulates total and SOC-derived CO 2 efflux by 26% and 37%, respectively, but has a minor effect on root-derived CO 2 efflux. Moreover, experimental warming only promotes total soil CO 2 efflux by 7-8% on average in the meta-analysis across all grasslands or alpine grasslands globally (none of these experiments were whole-soil warming). We show that whole-soil warming has a much stronger effect on soil carbon emission in the alpine grassland ecosystem than what was reported in previous warming experiments, most of which only heat surface soils.