Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
5789320 | Science Bulletin | 2015 | 14 Pages |
Abstract
Quantifying the carbon budgets of terrestrial ecosystems is the foundation on which to understand the role of these ecosystems as carbon sinks and to mitigate global climate change. Through a re-examination of the conceptual framework of ecosystem productivity and the integration of multi-source data, we assumed that the entire terrestrial ecosystems in China to be a large-scale regional biome-society system. We approximated the carbon fluxes of key natural and anthropogenic processes at a regional scale, including fluxes of emissions from reactive carbon and creature ingestion, and fluxes of emissions from anthropogenic and natural disturbances. The gross primary productivity, ecosystem respiration and net ecosystem productivity (NEP) in China were 7.78, 5.89 and 1.89Â PgC aâ1, respectively, during the period from 2001 to 2010. After accounting for the consumption of reactive carbon and creature ingestion (0.078Â PgC aâ1), fires (0.002Â PgC aâ1), water erosion (0.038Â PgC aâ1) and agricultural and forestry utilization (0.806Â PgC aâ1), the final carbon sink in China was about 0.966Â PgC aâ1; this was considered as the climate-based potential terrestrial ecosystem carbon sink for the current climate conditions in China. The carbon emissions caused by anthropogenic disturbances accounted for more than 42% of the NEP, which indicated that humans can play an important role in increasing terrestrial carbon sequestration and mitigating global climate change. This role can be fulfilled by reducing the carbon emissions caused by human activities and by prolonging the residence time of fixed organic carbon in the large-scale regional biome-society system through the improvement of ecosystem management.
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Physical Sciences and Engineering
Chemistry
Chemistry (General)
Authors
Qiufeng Wang, Han Zheng, Xianjin Zhu, Guirui Yu,