Vegetation and carbon
Analysis | Source |
This paper is not peer reviewed but covers an important summary about relative pros/cons of BECCS and the alternatives of silvopasture and evergreen energy (perennial agriculture). | |
Freeing land for natural ecological succession is a worthwhile low‐cost natural climate solution that has many co‐benefits for biodiversity and other ecosystem services. Allowing agricultural land to follow a natural succession (any kind of regrowth of natural vegetation) pathway must seriously be considered as an alternative climate change mitigation strategy to bioenergy. | |
Intact forests store much more carbon than logged, degraded or planted forests. | |
Big old trees fix more carbon than smaller trees (contrary to previous orthodoxy) | |
Ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi is fundamental to understanding the complex functioning of forests and carbon sequestration potential. EM enable trees:
EM is destroyed when forests are logged / ECM fungal diversity and relative abundance is preserved in proportion to the amount of retained trees. (c) | |
Conversion from natural vegetation to cropland changes the composition of fungi types away from ectomycorrhizal vegetation, which is associated with significantly higher soil carbon sequestration rates. | |
Arbuscular, ectomycorrhizal, and ericoid mycorrhizal vegetation store, respectively, 241 ± 15, 100 ± 17, and 7 ± 1.8 GT carbon in aboveground biomass, whereas non-mycorrhizal vegetation stores 29 ± 5.5 GT carbon. Soil carbon stocks in both topsoil and subsoil are positively related to the community-level biomass fraction of ectomycorrhizal plants, though the strength of this relationship varies across biomes. We show that human-induced transformations of Earth’s ecosystems have reduced ectomycorrhizal vegetation, with potential ramifications to terrestrial carbon stocks. Our work provides a benchmark for spatially explicit and globally quantitative assessments of mycorrhizal impacts on ecosystem functioning and biogeochemical cycling. |
Last modified 1yr ago