Abstract. A large amount of soil carbon in northern temperate and boreal regions could
be emitted as greenhouse gases in a warming future. However, lacking
detailed microbial processes such as microbial dormancy in current
biogeochemistry models might have biased the quantification of the regional
carbon dynamics. Here the effect of microbial dormancy was incorporated into
a biogeochemistry model to improve the quantification for the last century and this
century. Compared with the previous model without considering the microbial
dormancy, the new model estimated the regional soils stored 75.9 Pg more C
in the terrestrial ecosystems during the last century and will store 50.4 and 125.2 Pg more C under the RCP8.5 and RCP2.6 scenarios,
respectively, in this century. This study highlights the importance of the
representation of microbial dormancy in earth system models to adequately
quantify the carbon dynamics in the northern temperate and boreal natural
terrestrial ecosystems.
Contributions of wildland fire to terrestrial ecosystem carbon dynamics in North America from 1990 to 2012