Nonlinear Increase of Vegetation Carbon Storage in Aging Forests and Its Implications for Earth System Models

Abstract

AbstractVegetation carbon stock (Cveg) in global forests, which is important for C cycle‐climate feedbacks, commonly increases with forest age. Due to the allometric growth of plants, the nonlinear increase in Cveg with woody fraction (fw) is expected across space. However, it remains unclear whether such a nonlinear relationship between Cveg and fw can be constrained by observations and further used to benchmark Earth system models (ESMs). Here, based on the in situ measurements at 1,145 forest sites, we found that the nonlinear relationship between Cveg and fw followed an exponential equation (i.e., ). Then, we showed that such an exponential dependence of Cveg on fw also exists in ESMs of CMIP5 and CMIP6 (all P < 0.01), even though age‐dependent processes have not been incorporated in most models. However, the exponential Cveg‐fw relationship varied greatly among the models, and the coefficient b was systematically lower in the ESMs (0.08 ± 0.11; mean ± SD) than the observations (0.28). Based on a compiled forest age data set, we further found that the observed nonlinear increase of Cveg with forest age across the Northern Hemisphere (>30°N) was not captured by ESMs. These findings reveal a high disagreement on the spatially nonlinear relationship between vegetation carbon stock and woody fraction in current ESMs. The exponential relationship based on observations provides one useful benchmark for ESMs when they implement the age‐dependent processes in the future.