A new study led by a Chapman University climate scientist is the first to find the relationship between CO2 and temperature at the landscape level.
The study, which looks at the relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) and temperature, aims to find out how the Earth responds as it heats up due to climate change.
Scientists believe that a warming world calls for a new approach to detecting how much CO2 comes out of ecosystems when the temperature changes. This reveals how well plants and soil can alleviate damage by removing carbon pollution from the atmosphere.
The paper, ‘Biome-scale temperature sensitivity of ecosystem respiration revealed by atmospheric CO2 observations,’ is published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
The ability of plants to offset emissions may be diminished
Currently, some plants are able to take up a quarter to a third of humanity’s carbon emissions. However, according to the team, this rate of carbon dioxide removal may not be able to be maintained.
“A big unknown in the future of the Earth is how ecosystems will respond to increasing temperature,” said Joshua Fisher, a climate scientist and associate professor of environmental science and policy at Chapman University’s Schmid College of Science and Technology.
By looking into the relationship between CO2 and temperature, the team believes that their findings will provide insight into the fate of the Earth. The results will allow for the changes to be monitored on a large-scale.
The team used satellites to monitor global photosynthetic activity
Recent developments have led to the use of satellites to monitor global photosynthetic activity and measure the concentrations of gas in plants and ground soil.
However, similar tools have not been able to track respiration across biomes and continents. Respiration continues to be indirectly estimated as the difference between photosynthesis and the overall change in carbon dioxide.
Fisher argued that “the spot measurements are not representative of the larger landscape.”
Because of this, the team decided to use monitoring stations that are among the trees. Here, carbon dioxide measurements were taken by a network of dozens of monitoring stations on towers across North America.
The results revealed the relationship between CO2 and temperature in the larger landscape, providing insight into future measurements over larger swaths of land.
A sensitive relationship between CO2 and temperature doesn’t exist in a larger landscape
The team compared landscape measurements from the tower stations to spot measurements done on the ground. From this information, they found that the ground measurements show an overly sensitive relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature that does not exist when looking at the larger landscape.
“Ground measurements said there’s a lot of CO2 emission for small changes in temperature; but the landscape measurements said there’s not a lot of CO2 emission for small changes in temperature,” Fisher said.
The findings were used to update mathematical models
The team later used the findings to update mathematical models used to predict the relationship between CO2 and temperature. They found that when they were improved with the findings, the models were able to perform better.
“This is a very clever study that harnessed a myriad of measurements, models, and understanding of how they synergise together,” said Fisher.
“Our results continue to march us forward in deeper understanding of the Earth and what it may mean if we continue to change its climate.”
