Climate control on terrestrial biospheric carbon turnover.

ABSTRACT: Terrestrial vegetation and soils hold three times more carbon than the atmosphere. Much debate concerns how anthropogenic activity will perturb these surface reservoirs, potentially exacerbating ongoing changes to the climate system. Uncertainties specifically persist in extrapolating point-source observations to ecosystem-scale budgets and fluxes, which require consideration of vertical and lateral processes on multiple temporal and spatial scales. To explore controls on organic carbon (OC) turnover at the river basin scale, we present radiocarbon (¹⁴C) ages on two groups of molecular tracers of plant-derived carbon-leaf-wax lipids and lignin phenols-from a globally distributed suite of rivers. We find significant negative relationships between the ¹⁴C age of these b

SUBMITTER: Eglinton TI 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7923348 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature