764 results match your criteria: "Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry[Affiliation]"

Poly(butylene succinate-co-adipate) (PBSA), a biodegradable plastic, is significantly colonized and degraded by soil microbes under natural field conditions, especially by fungal plant pathogens, raising concerns about potential economic losses. This study hypothesizes that the degradation of biodegradable plastics may increase the presence and abundance of plant pathogens by serving as an additional carbon source, ultimately posing a risk to forest ecosystems. We investigated (i) fungal plant pathogens during the exposure of PBSA in European broadleaved and coniferous forests (two forest types), with a specific focus on potential risk to tree health, and (ii) the response of such fungi to environmental factors, including tree species, soil pH, nutrient availability, moisture content, and the physicochemical properties of leaf litter layer.

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Low latency carbon budget analysis reveals a large decline of the land carbon sink in 2023.

Natl Sci Rev

December 2024

Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, University Paris Saclay CEA CNRS, Gif sur Yvette 91191, France.

In 2023, the CO growth rate was 3.37 ± 0.11 ppm at Mauna Loa, which was 86% above that of the previous year and hit a record high since observations began in 1958, while global fossil fuel CO emissions only increased by 0.

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Extreme precipitation events are projected to intensify with global warming, threatening ecosystems and amplifying flood risks. However, observation-based estimates of extreme precipitation-temperature (EP-T) sensitivities show systematic spatio-temporal variability, with predominantly negative sensitivities across warmer regions. Here, we attribute this variability to confounding cloud radiative effects, which cool surfaces during rainfall, introducing covariation between rainfall and temperature beyond temperature's effect on atmospheric moisture-holding capacity.

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Article Synopsis
  • Plant communities consist of species with varying functional traits and evolutionary backgrounds, leading to the expectation that functional diversity increases with phylogenetic diversity.* -
  • Contrary to this expectation, a study of over 1.7 million vegetation plots showed that functional and phylogenetic diversity are weakly and negatively correlated, suggesting they operate independently.* -
  • Phylogenetic diversity is more pronounced in forests and reflects recent climate, while functional diversity is influenced by both past and recent climate, highlighting the need to assess both types of diversity for ecosystem studies and conservation strategies.*
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Multi-Taxa Responses to Climate Change in the Amazon Forest.

Glob Chang Biol

November 2024

Departamento de Biologia, Universidade Federal Do Amazonas, Manaus, Brazil.

Article Synopsis
  • Tropical biodiversity is facing significant changes due to intensified hydrological cycles, resulting in more severe droughts and wet seasons, which raises concerns about the resilience of ecosystems.
  • A 20-year study in Central Amazonia assessed the impacts of these climate changes on bird, fish, ant, and palm communities, revealing distinct responses where animals were more affected by sudden climate extremes, while palm species showed more stability over time.
  • The research indicated that while the 'insurance effect' helped moderate long-term impacts of climate events on biodiversity, the anticipated 'environmental refugia' did not effectively protect species during extreme weather conditions, highlighting the complex resilience of ecosystems amidst climate change.
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Linking leaf dark respiration to leaf traits and reflectance spectroscopy across diverse forest types.

New Phytol

November 2024

State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiangshan, Beijing, 100093, China.

Article Synopsis
  • Leaf dark respiration (R) is crucial for carbon cycling in forests but is often not quantified properly; this study examined how R relates to various leaf traits like maximum carboxylation capacity (V) across different forest types in China.
  • The research found that leaf magnesium and calcium concentrations are more relevant for explaining R variability than more common traits like leaf mass per area (LMA) and nitrogen (N) concentrations, but the relationships are generally weak and specific to each forest type.
  • Leaf spectroscopy proved to be a more effective method for predicting R compared to traditional trait relationships, revealing new traits with broader applicability and suggesting that spectroscopy could enhance models of plant respiration.
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The soil microbiome determines the fate of plant-fixed carbon. The shifts in soil properties caused by land use change leads to modifications in microbiome function, resulting in either loss or gain of soil organic carbon (SOC). Soil pH is the primary factor regulating microbiome characteristics leading to distinct pathways of microbial carbon cycling, but the underlying mechanisms remain understudied.

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The second law of thermodynamics, life and Earth's planetary machinery revisited.

Phys Life Rev

December 2024

Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry, Hans-Knöll-Str. 10, Jena 07745, Germany. Electronic address:

Life is a planetary feature that depends on its environment, but it has also strongly shaped the physical conditions on Earth, having created conditions highly suitable for a productive biosphere. Clearly, the second law of thermodynamics must apply to these dynamics as well, but how? What insights can we gain by placing life and its effects on planetary functioning in the context of the second law? In Kleidon (2010), I described a thermodynamic Earth system perspective by placing the functioning of the Earth system in terms of the second law. The Earth system is represented by a planetary hierarchy of energy transformations that are driven predominantly by incoming solar radiation, these transformations are constrained by the second law, but they are also modified by the feedbacks from various dissipative activities.

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Unlocking nitrogen management potential via large-scale farming for air quality and substantial co-benefits.

Natl Sci Rev

October 2024

John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

China's sustained air quality improvement is hindered by unregulated ammonia (NH) emissions from inefficient nitrogen management in smallholder farming. Although the Chinese government is promoting a policy shift to large-scale farming, the benefits of this, when integrated with nitrogen management, remain unclear. Here we fill this gap using an integrated assessment, by combining geostatistical analysis, high-resolution emission inventories, farm surveys and air quality modeling.

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The growth rate of the atmospheric abundance of methane (CH) reached a record high of 15.4 ppb yr between 2020 and 2022, but the mechanisms driving the accelerated CH growth have so far been unclear. In this work, we use measurements of the C:C ratio of CH (expressed as C) from NOAA's Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network and a box model to investigate potential drivers for the rapid CH growth.

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Plant leaves play a pivotal role in automated species identification using deep learning (DL). However, achieving reproducible capture of leaf variation remains challenging due to the inherent "black box" problem of DL models. To evaluate the effectiveness of DL in capturing leaf shape, we used geometric morphometrics (GM), an emerging component of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) toolkits.

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Chloroplast genomes (plastomes) represent a very important source of valuable information for phylogenetic and biogeographic reconstructions. The use of short reads (as those produced from Illumina sequencing), along with read assembly, has been considered the "gold standard" for plastome reconstruction. However, short reads often cannot reconstruct long repetitive regions in chloroplast genomes.

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Arctic soils are the largest pool of organic carbon compared with other soils globally and serve as a main source for greenhouse gases, especially in the course of the predicted future temperature increase. With increasing temperatures, substantial thawing of the permafrost layer of soils is expected, altering the availability of calcium in those soils, with an increase by ∼5 mg Ca g DW predicted for Alaska. Here we show for two representative soils in Alaska (initially Ca-poor or Ca-rich) that this increase in Ca availability will lead to decreases in CO release by 50% and 57%.

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The sensitivity of atmospheric CO growth rate to tropical temperature (γ) has almost doubled between 1959 and 2011, a trend that has been linked to increasing drought in the tropics. However, γ has declined since then. Understanding whether these variations in γ reflect forced changes or internal climate variability in the carbon cycle is crucial for future climate projections.

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Article Synopsis
  • KT2440 is a bacterium that thrives in soil and uses hard-to-digest carbon sources, relying on two key enzymes influenced by the availability of lanthanides (Ln).
  • Experiments showed light lanthanides promote bacterial growth while heavy lanthanides can hinder it due to mismetallation issues, which affect the bacterium’s ability to sense and respond to these elements.
  • The study enhances our understanding of how KT2440 adjusts gene expression based on the type of lanthanides present, revealing a nuanced regulatory mechanism between calcium and lanthanide-dependent enzymes.
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Opportunistic plant records provide a rapidly growing source of spatiotemporal plant observation data. Here, we used such data to explore the question whether they can be used to detect changes in species phenologies. Examining 19 herbaceous and one woody plant species in two consecutive years across Europe, we observed significant shifts in their flowering phenology, being more pronounced for spring-flowering species (6-17 days) compared to summer-flowering species (1-6 days).

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Nitrogen (N) nutrition impacts on primary carbon metabolism and can lead to changes in δC of respired CO. However, uncertainty remains as to whether (1) the effect of N nutrition is observed in all species, (2) N source also impacts on respired CO in roots and (3) a metabolic model can be constructed to predict δC of respired CO under different N sources. Here, we carried out isotopic measurements of respired CO and various metabolites using two species (spinach, French bean) grown under different NH :NO ratios.

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Article Synopsis
  • Ecosystems act as both sources and sinks for atmospheric carbon (C), and their carbon use efficiency (CUE) is crucial for mitigating climate change.
  • Increased nitrogen (N) availability from human activities may lead to phosphorus (P) limitations in terrestrial ecosystems, affecting how plants and microorganisms utilize carbon.
  • In a Mediterranean tree-grass ecosystem study, it was found that wetter conditions and N fertilization improved CUE, but seasonal changes and potential longer dry summers could decrease CUE in the future.
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Plant diversity enhances ecosystem multifunctionality via multitrophic diversity.

Nat Ecol Evol

November 2024

State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

Ecosystem functioning depends on biodiversity at multiple trophic levels, yet relationships between multitrophic diversity and ecosystem multifunctionality have been poorly explored, with studies often focusing on individual trophic levels and functions and on specific ecosystem types. Here, we show that plant diversity can affect ecosystem functioning both directly and by affecting other trophic levels. Using data on 13 trophic groups and 13 ecosystem functions from two large biodiversity experiments-one representing temperate grasslands and the other subtropical forests-we found that plant diversity increases multifunctionality through elevated multitrophic diversity.

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How can event attribution science underpin financial decisions on Loss and Damage?

PNAS Nexus

August 2024

Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace (IPSL), French National Centre for Scientific Research, Université Paris-Saclay, Sorbonne Université, place Jussieu, 75252 Paris, France.

With climate extremes hitting nations across the globe, disproportionately burdening vulnerable developing countries, the prompt operation of the Loss and Damage fund is of paramount importance. As decisions on resource disbursement at the international level, and investment strategies at the national level, loom, the climate science community's role in providing fair and effective evidence is crucial. Attribution science can provide useful information for decision makers, but both ethical implications and deep uncertainty cannot be ignored.

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The linkage between functional traits and drone-derived phenology of 74 Northern Hemisphere tree species.

Sci Total Environ

November 2024

TUM School of Life Sciences, Ecoclimatology, Technical University of Munich, Hans-Carl-von-Carlowitz-Platz 2, 85354 Freising, Germany; Institute for Advanced Study, Technical University of Munich, Lichtenbergstraße 2a, 85748 Garching, Germany. Electronic address:

Tree phenology is a major component of the global carbon and water cycle, serving as a fingerprint of climate change, and exhibiting significant variability both within and between species. In the emerging field of drone monitoring, it remains unclear whether this phenological variability can be effectively captured across numerous tree species. Additionally, the drivers behind interspecific variations in the phenology of deciduous trees are poorly understood, although they may be linked to plant functional traits.

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Introduction: Soil drought during summer in Central Europe has become more frequent and severe over the last decades. European forests are suffering increasing damage, particularly Norway spruce. Douglas-fir ( (Mirbel) Franco), a non-native tree species, is considered as a promising alternative to build drought-resilient forests.

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Article Synopsis
  • Elites were very important in shaping Europe after the Roman Empire fell, influencing both big and small communities during the Early Middle Ages.
  • Researchers studied a community in Italy from the 6th to 8th centuries and found that it was made up of related elite families that grew into one big family over time.
  • This community was diverse, welcoming different people as it developed, showing that powerful leaders could bring together various backgrounds instead of just sticking to their own.
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Enhanced nitrous oxide emission factors due to climate change increase the mitigation challenge in the agricultural sector.

Glob Chang Biol

August 2024

Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA.

Effective nitrogen fertilizer management is crucial for reducing nitrous oxide (NO) emissions while ensuring food security within planetary boundaries. However, climate change might also interact with management practices to alter NO emission and emission factors (EFs), adding further uncertainties to estimating mitigation potentials. Here, we developed a new hybrid modeling framework that integrates a machine learning model with an ensemble of eight process-based models to project EFs under different climate and nitrogen policy scenarios.

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Future changes in climate, together with rising atmospheric , may reorganise the functional composition of ecosystems. Without long-term historical data, predicting how traits will respond to environmental conditions-in particular, water availability-remains a challenge. While eco-evolutionary optimality theory (EEO) can provide insight into how plants adapt to their environment, EEO approaches to date have been formulated on the assumption that plants maximise carbon gain, which omits the important role of tissue construction and size in determining growth rates and fitness.

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