Abstract
While soil respiration is known to be controlled by a range of biotic and abiotic factors, its temperature sensitivity in global models is largely related to climate parameters. Here, we show that temperature sensitivity of soil respiration is primarily controlled by interacting soil properties and only secondarily by vegetation traits and plant growth conditions. Temperature was not identified as a primary driver for the response of soil respiration to warming. In contrast, the nonlinearity and large spatial variability of identified controls stress the importance of the interplay among soil, vegetation and climate parameters in controlling warming responses. Global models might predict current soil respiration but not future rates because they neglect the controls exerted by soil development. To accurately predict the response of soil respiration to warming at the global scale, more observational studies across pedogenetically diverse soils are needed rather than focusing on the isolated effect of warming alone. Understanding the temperature sensitivity of soil respiration is critical to determining soil carbon dynamics under climate change. Spatial heterogeneity in controls highlights the importance of interactions between vegetation, soil and climate in driving the response of respiration to warming.
Highlights
With implemented climate policies struggling to limit global warming to an average of less than 1.5 °C1, elucidating the response of an adapting ecosphere to warming is more and more important
Understanding soil C dynamics is key to this because it directly determines a large portion of future net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from terrestrial ecosystems[2]
To the best of our knowledge, previous models of soil Q10 took the average air temperature as main predictor for soil Q10.27-29 the global representation of soils and GHG emissions from them with their drivers and controls are not well represented in earth system models (ESMs) and Q10 is still treated as an average value over all climate zones and state-of-the-art in CMIP5 models to consider temperature sensitivity in soil[29,30,31,32]
Summary
With implemented climate policies struggling to limit global warming to an average of less than 1.5 °C1, elucidating the response of an adapting ecosphere to warming is more and more important. While the temperature sensitivity of soil carbon has been long studied[10,16], only ecosystem models begin to implement mechanistic controls of microbial soil respiration in response to climate and soil changes[17,18].
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