The browser you are using is not supported by this website. All versions of Internet Explorer are no longer supported, either by us or Microsoft (read more here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-ie-support).

Please use a modern browser to fully experience our website, such as the newest versions of Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari etc.

Longer growing seasons do not increase net carbon uptake in the northeastern Siberian tundra

Author

  • Frans-Jan Parmentier
  • M. K. van der Molen
  • J. van Huissteden
  • S. A. Karsanaev
  • A. V. Kononov
  • D. A. Suzdalov
  • T. C. Maximov
  • A. J. Dolman

Summary, in English

With global warming, snowmelt is occurring earlier and growing seasons are becoming longer around the Arctic. It has been suggested that this would lead to more uptake of carbon due to a lengthening of the period in which plants photosynthesize. To investigate this suggestion, 8 consecutive years of eddy covariance measurements at a northeastern Siberian graminoid tundra site were investigated for patterns in net ecosystem exchange, gross primary production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration (R-eco). While GPP showed no clear increase with longer growing seasons, it was significantly increased in warmer summers. Due to these warmer temperatures however, the increase in uptake was mostly offset by an increase in R-eco. Therefore, overall variability in net carbon uptake was low, and no relationship with growing season length was found. Furthermore, the highest net uptake of carbon occurred with the shortest and the coldest growing season. Low uptake of carbon mostly occurred with longer or warmer growing seasons. We thus conclude that the net carbon uptake of this ecosystem is more likely to decrease rather than to increase under a warmer climate. These results contradict previous research that has showed more net carbon uptake with longer growing seasons. We hypothesize that this difference is due to site-specific differences, such as climate type and soil, and that changes in the carbon cycle with longer growing seasons will not be uniform around the Arctic.

Publishing year

2011

Language

English

Pages

04013-04013

Publication/Series

Journal of Geophysical Research

Volume

116

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Wiley-Blackwell

Topic

  • Physical Geography

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 2156-2202