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Sagebrush carrying out hydraulic lift enhances surface soil nitrogen cycling and nitrogen uptake into inflorescences
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Plant roots serve as conduits for water flow not only from soil to leaves but also from wetter to drier soil. This hydraulic redistribution through root systems occurs in soils worldwide and can enhance stomatal opening, transpiration, and plant carbon gain. For decades, upward hydraulic lift (HL) of deep water through roots into dry, litter-rich, surface soil also has been hypothesized to enhance nutrient availability to plants by stimulating microbially controlled nutrient cycling. This link has not been demonstrated in the field. Working in sagebrush-steppe, where water and nitrogen limit plant growth and reproduction and where HL occurs naturally during summer drought, we slightly augmented deep soil water availability to 14 HL+ treatment plants throughout the summer growing season. The HL+ sagebrush lifted greater amounts of water than control plants and had slightly less negative predawn and midday leaf water potentials. Soil respiration was also aug- mented under HL+ plants. At summer’s end, application of a gas- based 15N isotopic labeling technique revealed increased rates of nitrogen cycling in surface soil layers around HL+ plants and increased uptake of nitrogen into HL+ plants’ inflorescences as sagebrush set seed. These treatment effects persisted even though unexpected monsoon rainstorms arrived during assays and increased surface soil moisture around all plants. Simulation models from ecosystem to global scales have just begun to include effects of hydraulic redistribution on water and surface energy fluxes. Results from this field study indicate that plants carrying out HL can also substantially enhance decomposition and nitrogen cycling in surface soils.
rhizosphere | flowering | seed production
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Microclimate moderates plant responses to macroclimate warming
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Recent global warming is acting across marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems to favor species adapted to warmer conditions and/or reduce the abundance of cold-adapted organisms (i.e., “thermophilization” of communities). Lack of community responses to increased temperature, however, has also been re-ported for several taxa and regions, suggesting that “climatic lags” may be frequent. Here we show that microclimatic effects brought about by forest canopy closure can buffer biotic re- sponses to macroclimate warming, thus explaining an apparent climatic lag. Using data from 1,409 vegetation plots in European and North American temperate forests, each surveyed at least twice over an interval of 12–67 y, we document significant thermophilization of ground-layer plant communities. These changes reflect concurrent declines in species adapted to cooler conditions and increases in species adapted to warmer conditions. However, thermophilization, particularly the increase of warm-adapted species, is attenuated in forests whose canopies have become denser, probably reflecting cooler growing-season ground temperatures via increased shading. As standing stocks of trees have increased in many temperate forests in recent decades, local microclimatic effects may commonly be moderating the impacts of macroclimate warming on forest understories. Conversely, increases in harvesting woody biomass—e.g., for bioenergy—may open forest canopies and accelerate thermophilization of temperate forest biodiversity.
climate change | forest management | understory | climatic debt | range shifts
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Soil food web properties explain ecosystem services across European land use systems
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Intensive land use reduces the diversity and abundance of many soil biota, with consequences for the processes that they govern and the ecosystem services that these processes underpin. Relationships between soil biota and ecosystem processes have mostly been found in laboratory experiments and rarely are found in the field. Here, we quantified, across four countries of contrasting climatic and soil conditions in Europe, how differences in soil food web composition resulting from land use systems (intensive wheat rotation, extensive rotation, and permanent grassland) influence the functioning of soils and the ecosystem services that they deliver. Intensive wheat rotation consistently reduced the biomass of all components of the soil food web across all countries. Soil food web properties strongly and consistently predicted processes of C and N cycling across land use systems and geographic loca- tions, and they were a better predictor of these processes than land use. Processes of carbon loss increased with soil food web properties that correlated with soil C content, such as earthworm biomass and fungal/bacterial energy channel ratio, and were greatest in permanent grassland. In contrast, processes of N cycling were explained by soil food web properties independent of land use, such as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and bacterial channel biomass. Our quantification of the contribution of soil organisms to processes of C and N cycling across land use systems and geographic locations shows that soil biota need to be included in C and N cycling models and highlights the need to map and conserve soil biodiversity across the world.
soil fauna | modeling | soil microbes | nitrogen
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Evolution of natural and social science interactions in global change research programs
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Efforts to develop a global understanding of the functioning of the Earth as a system began in the mid-1980s. This effort necessitated linking knowledge from both the physical and biological realms. A motivation for this development was the growing impact of humans on the Earth system and need to provide solutions, but the study of the social drivers and their consequences for the changes that were occurring was not incorporated into the Earth System Science movement, despite early attempts to do so. The impediments to integration were many, but they are gradually being overcome, which can be seen in many trends for assessments, such as the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, as well as both basic and applied science programs. In this development, particular people and events have shaped the trajectories that have occurred. The lessons learned should be considered in such emerging research programs as Future Earth, the new global program for sustainability research. The transitioning process to this new program will take time as scientists adjust to new colleagues with different ideologies, methods, and tools and a new way of doing science.
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Gas production in the Barnett Shale obeys a simple scaling theory
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Natural gas from tight shale formations will provide the United States with a major source of energy over the next several decades. Estimates of gas production from these formations have mainly relied on formulas designed for wells with a different geometry. We consider the simplest model of gas production consistent with the basic physics and geometry of the extraction process. In principle, solutions of the model depend upon many parameters, but in practice and within a given gas field, all but two can be fixed at typical values, leading to a nonlinear diffusion problem we solve exactly with a scaling curve. The scaling curve production rate declines as 1 over the square root of time early on, and it later declines exponentially. This simple model provides a surprisingly accurate description of gas extraction from 8,294 wells in the United States’ oldest shale play, the Barnett Shale. There is good agreement with the scaling theory for 2,057 horizontal wells in which production started to decline exponentially in less than 10 y. The remaining 6,237 horizontal wells in our analysis are too young for us to predict when exponential decline will set in, but the model can nevertheless be used to establish lower and upper bounds on well lifetime. Finally, we obtain upper and lower bounds on the gas that will be produced by the wells in our sample, in- dividually and in total. The estimated ultimate recovery from our sample of 8,294 wells is between 10 and 20 trillion standard cubic feet.
hydrofracturing | shale gas | scaling laws | energy resources | fracking
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Hot climates, high sensitivity
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Concluding paragraph: One sure solution to the problem posed by uncertainty of climate sensitivity in hot climates is simply not to go there. Unfortunately, it looks increasingly like Nature will step in to answer some of our questions for us, and I doubt we’ll like the answer. The highest emission scenario currently being considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (8), which would bring CO2 concentrations up to 2,000 ppm, which is in the upper reaches of the range considered in ref. 2. Even this scenario can be considered somewhat optimistic, in that it assumes that the annual growth in CO emissions rate (which has been hovering around 3% for decades) will tail off by 2060 and that the emissions rate will cease growing altogether by 2100, whereafter emissions will trend to zero; unrestrained growth could eas- ily dump twice as much carbon into the atmosphere. It is not known if there are actually enough recoverable fossil fuels to emit that much CO2. Hoping that we run out of fossil fuels before bringing on a climate catastrophe does not seem like sound climate policy, but at present it seems to be the only one we have.
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The elephant, the blind, and the intersectoral intercomparison of climate impacts
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1st paragraph: When decision makers discuss anthropogenic climate change, they often ignore the mighty elephant in the room, namely the question of what global warming really means on the ground. By all accounts, the impacts on our physical environment and society would be starkly different if our planet warmed by “just” 2 °C (1, 2), by a “dangerous” 4 °C (3), or by a “mind-boggling” 6–8 °C (4). However, the pictures of those sweltering worlds that are emerging from scientific research are still regrettably vague, blurred, and fragmentary (see, for example, refs. 5–7). The main reason for this vagueness is as obvious as it is tantalizing: the sheer diversity and complexity of potential climate-change effects on the existing multitude of regions, sectors, and cultures make the swift advancement of robust knowl- edge in this field extremely challenging.
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Water-controlled wealth of nations
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Population growth is in general constrained by food production, which in turn depends on the access to water resources. At a country level, some populations use more water than they control because of their ability to import food and the virtual water required for its production. Here, we investigate the dependence of demographic growth on available water resources for exporting and importing nations. By quantifying the carrying capacity of nations on the basis of calculations of the virtual water available through the food trade network, we point to the existence of a global water unbalance. We suggest that current export rates will not be maintained and consequently we question the long-term sustainability of the food trade system as a whole. Water-rich regions are likely to soon reduce the amount of virtual water they export, thus leaving import-dependent regions without enough water to sustain their populations. We also investigate the potential impact of possible scenarios that might mitigate these effects through (i) cooperative interactions among nations whereby water-rich countries main- tain a tiny fraction of their food production available for export, (ii ) changes in consumption patterns, and (iii ) a positive feedback between demographic growth and technological innovations. We find that these strategies may indeed reduce the vulnerability of water-controlled societies.
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Delayed detection of climate mitigation benefits due to climate inertia and variability
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Climate change mitigation acts by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and thus curbing, or even reversing, the increase in their atmospheric concentration. This reduces the associated anthropogenic radiative forcing, and hence the size of the warming. Because of the inertia and internal variability affecting the climate system and the global carbon cycle, it is unlikely that a reduction in warming would be immediately discernible. Here we use 21st century simulations from the latest ensemble of Earth System Model experiments to investigate and quantify when mitigation becomes clearly discernible. We use one of the scenarios as a reference for a strong mitigation strategy, Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 2.6 and compare its outcome with either RCP4.5 or RCP8.5, both of which are less severe mitigation pathways. We analyze global mean atmospheric CO2, and changes in annually and seasonally averaged surface temperature at global and regional scales. For global mean surface temperature, the median detection time of mitigation is about 25–30 y after RCP2.6 emissions depart from the higher emission trajectories. This translates into detection of a mitigation signal by 2035 or 2045, depending on whether the comparison is with RCP8.5 or RCP4.5, respectively. The detection of climate benefits of emission mitigation occurs later at regional scales, with a median detection time between 30 and 45 y after emission paths separate. Requiring a 95% confidence level induces a delay of several decades, bringing detection time toward the end of the 21st century.
regional climate change | climate variability | signal detection
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The material footprint of nations
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Metrics on resource productivity currently used by governments suggest that some developed countries have increased the use of natural resources at a slower rate than economic growth (relative decoupling) or have even managed to use fewer resources over time (absolute decoupling). Using the material footprint (MF), a consumption-based indicator of resource use, we find the contrary: Achievements in decoupling in advanced economies are smaller than reported or even nonexistent. We present a time series analysis of the MF of 186 countries and identify material flows associated with global production and consumption networks in unprecedented specificity. By calculating raw material equivalents of international trade, we demonstrate that countries’ use of nondomestic resources is, on average, about threefold larger than the physical quantity of traded goods. As wealth grows, countries tend to reduce their domestic portion of materials extraction through international trade, whereas the overall mass of material consumption generally increases. With every 10% increase in gross domestic product, the average national MF increases by 6%. Our findings call into question the sole use of current resource productivity indicators in policy making and suggest the necessity of an additional focus on consumption- based accounting for natural resource use.
raw material consumption | multiregion input–output analysis | sustainable resource management
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