Virginia Tech researchers, in collaboration with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, have discovered that key parts of the global carbon cycle used to track movement of carbon dioxide in the environment are not correct, which could significantly alter conventional carbon cycle models.
The estimate of how much carbon dioxide plants pull from the atmosphere is critical to accurately monitor and predict the amount of climate-changing gasses in the atmosphere. This finding has the potential to change predictions for climate change, though it is unclear at this juncture if the mismatch will result in more or less carbon dioxide being accounted for in the environment.
“Either the amount of carbon coming out of the atmosphere from the plants is wrong or the amount coming out of the soil is wrong,” said Meredith Steele, an assistant professor in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, whose Ph.D. student at the time, Jinshi Jian, led the research team. The findings were published Friday in Nature Communications.
“We are not challenging the well-established climate change science, but we should be able to account for all carbon in the ecosystem and currently cannot,” she said. “What we found is that the models of the ecosystem’s response to climate change need updating.”
Read more at Virginia Tech
Image: Student planting (Credit: Virginia Tech)