Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Letter
  • Published:

Temperature-associated increases in the global soil respiration record

Nature volume 464, pages 579–582 (2010)Cite this article

Subjects

This article has been updated

Abstract

Soil respiration, RS, the flux of microbially and plant-respired carbon dioxide (CO2) from the soil surface to the atmosphere, is the second-largest terrestrial carbon flux1,2,3. However, the dynamics of RS are not well understood and the global flux remains poorly constrained4,5. Ecosystem warming experiments6,7, modelling analyses8,9 and fundamental biokinetics10 all suggest that RS should change with climate. This has been difficult to confirm observationally because of the high spatial variability of RS, inaccessibility of the soil medium and the inability of remote-sensing instruments to measure RS on large scales. Despite these constraints, it may be possible to discern climate-driven changes in regional or global RS values in the extant four-decade record of RS chamber measurements. Here we construct a database of worldwide RS observations matched with high-resolution historical climate data and find a previously unknown temporal trend in the RS record after accounting for mean annual climate, leaf area, nitrogen deposition and changes in CO2 measurement technique. We find that the air temperature anomaly (the deviation from the 1961–1990 mean) is significantly and positively correlated with changes in RS. We estimate that the global RS in 2008 (that is, the flux integrated over the Earth’s land surface over 2008) was 98 ± 12 Pg C and that it increased by 0.1 Pg C yr-1 between 1989 and 2008, implying a global RS response to air temperature (Q10) of 1.5. An increasing global RS value does not necessarily constitute a positive feedback to the atmosphere, as it could be driven by higher carbon inputs to soil rather than by mobilization of stored older carbon. The available data are, however, consistent with an acceleration of the terrestrial carbon cycle in response to global climate change.

Access through your institution
Buy or subscribe

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Access through your institution

Buy this article

  • Purchase on SpringerLink
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Collected data on observed R S , by biome.
Figure 2: Estimated annual global RS.
Figure 3: Histograms of modelled R S rates by grid cell.

Similar content being viewed by others

Change history

  • 17 June 2010

    In the first paragraph of the online-only Methods, the last two sentences were corrected. Please see the corrigendum at the end of the PDF for details.

References

  1. Schimel, D. S. et al. in Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change (ed. Houghton, J. T.) 76–86 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Raich, J. W. & Potter, C. S. Global patterns of carbon dioxide emissions from soils. Glob. Biogeochem. Cycles 9, 23–36 (1995)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Schlesinger, W. H. Carbon balance in terrestrial detritus. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 8, 51–81 (1977)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  4. Trumbore, S. E. Carbon respired by terrestrial ecosystems–recent progress and challenges. Glob. Change Biol. 12, 141–153 (2006)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  5. Jones, C. D., Cox, P. M. & Huntingford, C. Uncertainty in climate-carbon-cycle projections associated with the sensitivity of soil respiration to temperature. Tellus B 55, 642–648 (2003)

    ADS  Google Scholar 

  6. Bronson, D. et al. Response of soil surface CO2 flux in a boreal forest to ecosystem warming. Glob. Change Biol. 14, 856–867 (2008)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  7. Luo, Y., Wan, S. & Hui, D. Acclimatization of soil respiration to warming in a tall grass prairie. Nature 413, 622–625 (2001)

    Article  ADS  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  8. Raich, J. W., Potter, C. S. & Bhagawati, D. Interannual variability in global soil respiration, 1980–94. Glob. Change Biol. 8, 800–812 (2002)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  9. McGuire, A. D. et al. Equilibrium responses of soil carbon to climate change: empirical and process-based estimates. J. Biogeogr. 22, 785–796 (1995)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Davidson, E. A. & Janssens, I. A. Temperature sensitivity of soil carbon decomposition and feedbacks to climate change. Nature 440, 165–173 (2006)

    Article  ADS  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  11. Jones, C. D. & Cox, P. M. Constraints on the temperature sensitivity of global soil respiration from the observed interannual variability in atmospheric CO2 . Atmos. Sci. Lett. 2, 166–172 (2001)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  12. Davidson, E. A., Janssens, I. A. & Luo, Y. On the variability of respiration in terrestrial ecosystems: moving beyond Q 10 . Glob. Change Biol. 12, 154–164 (2006)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  13. Luyssaert, S. et al. CO2 balance of boreal, temperate, and tropical forests derived from a global database. Glob. Change Biol. 13, 2509–2537 (2007)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  14. Reichstein, M. & Beer, C. Soil respiration across scales: the importance of a model-data integration framework for data interpretation. J. Plant Nutr. Soil Sci. 171, 344–354 (2008)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  15. Raich, J. W. & Schlesinger, W. H. The global carbon dioxide flux in soil respiration and its relationship to vegetation and climate. Tellus B 44, 81–99 (1992)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  16. Reichstein, M. et al. Modeling temporal and large-scale spatial variability of soil respiration from soil water availability, temperature and vegetation productivity indices. Glob. Biogeochem. Cycles 17, 1104 (2003)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  17. Magnani, F. et al. The human footprint in the carbon cycle of temperate and boreal forests. Nature 447, 849–851 (2007)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  18. Janssens, I. A. et al. Assessing forest soil CO2 efflux: an in situ comparison of four techniques. Tree Physiol. 20, 23–32 (2000)

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  19. Zhou, L. et al. Variations in northern vegetation activity inferred from satellite data of vegetation index during 1981 to 1999. J. Geophys. Res. 106, 20069–20083 (2001)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  20. Jarvis, P. G. & Linder, S. Constraints to growth of boreal forests. Nature 405, 904–905 (2000)

    Article  ADS  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  21. Goetz, S. J. et al. Satellite-observed photosynthetic trends across boreal North America associated with climate and fire disturbance. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 102, 13521–13525 (2005)

    Article  ADS  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  22. Dorrepaal, E. et al. Carbon respiration from subsurface peat accelerated by climate warming in the subarctic. Nature 460, 616–619 (2009)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  23. Potter, C. S. & Klooster, S. Interannual variability in soil trace gas (CO2, N2O, NO) fluxes and analysis of controllers on regional to global scales. Glob. Biogeochem. Cycles 12, 621–635 (1998)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  24. Bond-Lamberty, B., Wang, C. & Gower, S. T. A global relationship between the heterotrophic and autotrophic components of soil respiration? Glob. Change Biol. 10, 1756–1766 (2004)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  25. Knorr, W. et al. Long-term sensitivity of soil carbon turnover to warming. Nature 433, 298–301 (2005)

    Article  ADS  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  26. Bradford, M. A. et al. Thermal adaptation of soil microbial respiration to elevated temperature. Ecol. Lett. 11, 1316–1327 (2008)

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  27. Wutzler, T. & Reichstein, M. Colimitation of decomposition by substrate and decomposers - a comparison of model formulations. Biogeosciences 5, 749–759 (2008)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  28. R Development Core Team. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing (R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna) 〈http://www.r-project.org〉 (2009)

  29. Masson, V. et al. A global database of land surface parameters at 1-km resolution in meteorological and climate models. J. Clim. 16, 1261–1282 (2003)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  30. Goldewijk, K. K., Van Drecht, G. & Bouwman, A. F. Mapping contemporary global cropland and grassland distributions on a 5 by 5 minute resolution. J. Land Use Sci. 2, 167–190 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the US Department of Energy Office of Science and the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. It would not have been possible without the thousands of researchers who measured and published the data collected here. We thank B. Melchior for his assistance.

Author Contributions B.B.-L. and A.T. designed the study. B.B.-L. collected studies and analysed data, and with A.T. wrote the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland–College Park, 5825 University Research Court, Suite 3500, College Park, Maryland 20740, USA ,

    Ben Bond-Lamberty & Allison Thomson

Authors
  1. Ben Bond-Lamberty
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  2. Allison Thomson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ben Bond-Lamberty.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information 1

This file contains a guide to Supplementary Data Files 1-3 and Supplementary Information 2. (PDF 132 kb)

Supplementary Data 1

This file contains the soil respiration database. In the version of this file that was originally posted online, a data field (‘Biome’) was missing that has now been corrected. This file was replaced on 24 June 2010. (TXT 118 kb)

Supplementary Data 2

The file contains the studies database, listing reference information for each study in the soil respiration database. (TXT 84 kb)

Supplementary Data 3

This file contains the R programmes used for the data-processing and statistical analysis. (TXT 41 kb)

Supplementary Information 2

This file contains Supplementary Tables S1-S2, a Supplementary Biome Map and a Supplementary Flux Map. (PDF 2814 kb)

PowerPoint slides

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Bond-Lamberty, B., Thomson, A. Temperature-associated increases in the global soil respiration record. Nature 464, 579–582 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08930

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08930

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing