scholarly journals Large historical carbon emissions from cultivated northern peatlands

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (23) ◽  
pp. eabf1332
Author(s):  
Chunjing Qiu ◽  
Philippe Ciais ◽  
Dan Zhu ◽  
Bertrand Guenet ◽  
Shushi Peng ◽  
...  

When a peatland is drained and cultivated, it behaves as a notable source of CO2. However, we lack temporally and spatially explicit estimates of carbon losses from cultivated peatlands. Using a process-based land surface model that explicitly includes representation of peatland processes, we estimate that northern peatlands converted to croplands emitted 72 Pg C over 850–2010, with 45% of this source having occurred before 1750. This source surpassed the carbon accumulation by high-latitude undisturbed peatlands (36 to 47 Pg C). Carbon losses from the cultivation of northern peatlands are omitted in previous land-use emission assessments. Adding this ignored historical land-use emission implies an 18% larger terrestrial carbon storage since 1750 to close the historical global carbon budget. We also show that carbon emission per unit area decrease with time since drainage, suggesting that time since drainage should be accounted for in inventories to refine land-use emissions from cultivated peatlands.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chunjing Qiu ◽  
Dan Zhu ◽  
Philippe Ciais ◽  
Bertrand Guenet ◽  
Shushi Peng ◽  
...  

Abstract. The importance of northern peatlands in the global carbon cycle has recently been recognized, especially for long-term changes. Yet, the complex interactions between climate and peatland hydrology, carbon storage and area dynamics make it challenging to represent these systems in land surface models. This study describes how peatland are included as an independent sub-grid hydrological soil unit (HSU) into the ORCHIDEE-MICT land surface model. The peatland soil column in this tile is characterized by multi-layered vertical water and carbon transport, and peat-specific hydrological properties. A cost-efficient TOPMODEL approach is implemented to simulate the dynamics of peatland area, calibrated by present-day wetland areas that are regularly inundated or subject to shallow water tables. The model is tested across a range of northern peatland sites and for gridded simulations over the Northern Hemisphere (> 30° N). Simulated northern peatland area (3.9 million km2), peat carbon stock (463 PgC) and peat depth are generally consistent with observed estimates of peatland area (3.4–4.0 million km2), peat carbon (270–540 PgC) and data compilations of peat core depths. Our results show that both net primary production (NPP) and heterotrophic respiration (HR) of northern peatlands increased over the past century in response to CO2 and climate change. NPP increased more rapidly than HR, and thus net ecosystem production (NEP) exhibited a positive trend, contributing a cumulative carbon storage of 11.13 Pg C since 1901, most of it being realized after the 1950s.


Heliyon ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (9) ◽  
pp. e02469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Achenafi Teklay ◽  
Yihun T. Dile ◽  
Dereje H. Asfaw ◽  
Haimanote K. Bayabil ◽  
Kibruyesfa Sisay

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 4713-4747
Author(s):  
Tokuta Yokohata ◽  
Tsuguki Kinoshita ◽  
Gen Sakurai ◽  
Yadu Pokhrel ◽  
Akihiko Ito ◽  
...  

Abstract. Future changes in the climate system could have significant impacts on the natural environment and human activities, which in turn affect changes in the climate system. In the interaction between natural and human systems under climate change conditions, land use is one of the elements that play an essential role. On the one hand, future climate change will affect the availability of water and food, which may impact land-use change. On the other hand, human-induced land-use change can affect the climate system through biogeophysical and biogeochemical effects. To investigate these interrelationships, we developed MIROC-INTEG-LAND (MIROC INTEGrated LAND surface model version 1), an integrated model that combines the land surface component of global climate model MIROC (Model for Interdisciplinary Research on Climate) with water resources, crop production, land ecosystem, and land-use models. The most significant feature of MIROC-INTEG-LAND is that the land surface model that describes the processes of the energy and water balance, human water management, and crop growth incorporates a land use decision-making model based on economic activities. In MIROC-INTEG-LAND, spatially detailed information regarding water resources and crop yields is reflected in the prediction of future land-use change, which cannot be considered in the conventional integrated assessment models. In this paper, we introduce the details and interconnections of the submodels of MIROC-INTEG-LAND, compare historical simulations with observations, and identify various interactions between the submodels. By evaluating the historical simulation, we have confirmed that the model reproduces the observed states well. The future simulations indicate that changes in climate have significant impacts on crop yields, land use, and irrigation water demand. The newly developed MIROC-INTEG-LAND could be combined with atmospheric and ocean models to develop an integrated earth system model to simulate the interactions among coupled natural–human earth system components.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elodie Salmon ◽  
Fabrice Jégou ◽  
Bertrand Guenet ◽  
Line Jourdain ◽  
Chunjing Qiu ◽  
...  

Abstract. In the global methane budget, the largest natural source is attributed to wetlands that encompass all ecosystems composed of waterlogged or inundated ground, capable of methane production. Among them, northern peatlands that store large amounts of soil organic carbon have been functioning, since the end of the last glaciation period, as long-term sources of methane (CH4) and are one of the most significant methane sources among wetlands. To reduce global methane budget uncertainties, it is of significance to understand processes driving methane production and fluxes in northern peatlands. A methane model that features methane production and transport by plants, ebullition process and diffusion in soil, oxidation to CO2 and CH4 fluxes to the atmosphere has been embedded in the ORCHIDEE-PEAT land surface model which includes an explicit representation of northern peatlands. This model, ORCHIDEE-PCH4 was calibrated and evaluated on 14 peatland sites distributed on both Eurasian and American continents in the northern boreal and temperate regions. Data assimilation approaches were employed to optimized parameters at each site and at all sites simultaneously. Results show that, in ORCHIDEE-PCH4, methanogenesis is sensitive to temperature and substrate availability over the top 75 cm of soil depth. Methane emissions estimated using single site optimization (SSO) of model parameters are underestimated by 9 g CH4 m−2 year−1 on average (i.e. 50 % higher than the site average of yearly methane emissions). While using the multi-sites optimization (MSO), methane emissions are overestimated by 5 g CH4 m−2 year−1 on average across all investigated sites (i.e. 37 % lower than the site average of yearly methane emissions).


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloé Largeron ◽  
Gerhard Krinner ◽  
Philippe Ciais ◽  
Claire Brutel-Vuilmet

Abstract. Widely present in boreal regions, peatlands contain large carbon stocks because of their hydrologic properties and high water content, making decomposition smaller than primary productivity. We have enhanced the global land surface model ORCHIDEE by introducing northern peatlands. These are considered as a new Plant Functional Types (PFT) in the model, with specific hydrological properties for peat soil. In this paper, we focus on the representation of the hydrology of northern peatlands and on the evaluation of the hydrological impact of this implementation. A prescribed map based on the inventory of Yu et al. (2010) defines peatlands as a fraction of grid cell represented as a PFT comparable to C3 grasses with adaptations to reproduce shallow roots and higher photosynthesis stress. The treatment of peatland hydrology differs from that of other vegetation types by the fact that runoff from other soil types is partially directed towards the peatlands (instead of directly to the river network). The evaluation of this implementation was carried out according to different spatial and temporal scales, from site evaluation to larger scales such as watershed scale and all northern latitudes scale. The simulated net ecosystem exchanges are in agreement with observations from 3 FLUXNET sites. Water table positions were generally close to observations, with some exceptions in winter. Compared to other soils, the simulated peat soil have a reduced seasonal variability of water storage. The seasonal cycle of inundated peatlands area is also compared to flooded area estimated from satellite observations. The model is able to represents more than 89.5 % of the flooded areas located in peatlands areas, where the modelled extent of inundated peatlands reaches 0.83 Mkm2. However, the extent of peatland in northern latitudes is small enough that is does not impact the terrestrial water storage at scale of latitudes over 45° N. Therefore, the inclusion of peatlands has a weak impact on the river discharge located in boreal regions.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 1411-1435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gina Tsarouchi ◽  
Wouter Buytaert

Abstract. Quantifying how land-use change and climate change affect water resources is a challenge in hydrological science. This work aims to quantify how future projections of land-use and climate change might affect the hydrological response of the Upper Ganges river basin in northern India, which experiences monsoon flooding almost every year. Three different sets of modelling experiments were run using the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) land surface model (LSM) and covering the period 2000–2035: in the first set, only climate change is taken into account, and JULES was driven by the CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5) outputs of 21 models, under two representative concentration pathways (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5), whilst land use was held fixed at the year 2010. In the second set, only land-use change is taken into account, and JULES was driven by a time series of 15 future land-use pathways, based on Landsat satellite imagery and the Markov chain simulation, whilst the meteorological boundary conditions were held fixed at years 2000–2005. In the third set, both climate change and land-use change were taken into consideration, as the CMIP5 model outputs were used in conjunction with the 15 future land-use pathways to force JULES. Variations in hydrological variables (stream flow, evapotranspiration and soil moisture) are calculated during the simulation period. Significant changes in the near-future (years 2030–2035) hydrologic fluxes arise under future land-cover and climate change scenarios pointing towards a severe increase in high extremes of flow: the multi-model mean of the 95th percentile of streamflow (Q5) is projected to increase by 63 % under the combined land-use and climate change high emissions scenario (RCP8.5). The changes in all examined hydrological components are greater in the combined land-use and climate change experiment. Results are further presented in a water resources context, aiming to address potential implications of climate change and land-use change from a water demand perspective. We conclude that future water demands in the Upper Ganges region for winter months may not be met.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantelle Burton ◽  
Richard Betts ◽  
Chris Jones ◽  
Douglas Kelley

<p>Fire has an important impact on the terrestrial carbon cycle, affecting the growth and distribution of vegetation, and altering carbon stores in vegetation and soils. This is further complicated by the interaction with people, through land-use change, ignitions and fire management. This work presents the latest results from the recently coupled JULES-INFERNO fire enabled land surface model, and the interaction of fire, dynamic vegetation and varying land use. The results of historical and present-day global simulations are evaluated using observations of burned area and emissions, and through use of tools such as ilamb. The model performs well globally compared to observations, and improves the simulation of vegetation especially in the tropics. The model is also used to address how fire may change under different climate scenarios, including El Niño events, and future simulations of climate change. Results show that burned area increases in some areas with El Niño conditions such as those of 2015/16, especially in South America where a 13% increase in burned area and emitted carbon is simulated. This negatively impacts carbon uptake in this region, and reduces the terrestrial carbon sink.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. 2791-2805
Author(s):  
Kristina Bohm ◽  
Joachim Ingwersen ◽  
Josipa Milovac ◽  
Thilo Streck

Abstract. Land surface models are essential parts of climate and weather models. The widely used Noah-MP land surface model requires information on the leaf area index (LAI) and green vegetation fraction (GVF) as key inputs of its evapotranspiration scheme. The model aggregates all agricultural areas into a land use class termed “cropland and pasture”. In a previous study we showed that, on a regional scale, the GVF has a bimodal distribution formed by two crop groups differing in phenology and growth dynamics: early-covering crops (ECC; e.g., winter wheat, winter rapeseed, winter barley) and late-covering crops (LCC; e.g., corn, silage maize, sugar beet). That result can be generalized for central Europe. The present study quantifies the effect of splitting the land use class cropland and pasture of Noah-MP into ECC and LCC on surface energy fluxes and temperature. We further studied the influence of increasing the LCC share, which in the study area (the Kraichgau region, southwest Germany) is mainly the result of heavily subsidized biomass production, on energy partitioning at the land surface. We used the GVF dynamics derived from high-resolution (5 m × 5 m) RapidEye satellite data and measured LAI data for the simulations. Our results confirm that the GVF and LAI strongly influence the partitioning of surface energy fluxes, resulting in pronounced differences between simulations of ECC and LCC. Splitting up the generic crop into ECC and LCC had the strongest effect on land surface exchange processes in July–August. During this period, ECC are at the senescence growth stage or already harvested, while LCC have a well-developed ground-covering canopy. The generic crop resulted in humid bias, i.e., an increase in evapotranspiration by +0.5 mm d−1 (latent heat flux is 1.3 MJ m−2 d−1), decrease in sensible heat flux (H) by 1.2 MJ m−2  d−1 and decrease in surface temperature by −1 ∘C. The bias increased as the shares of ECC and LCC became similar. The observed differences will impact the simulations of processes in the planetary boundary layer. Increasing the LCC share from 28 % to 38 % in the Kraichgau region led to a decrease in latent heat flux (LE) and a heating up of the land surface in the early growing season. Over the second part of the season, LE increased and the land surface cooled down by up to 1 ∘C.


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