Nitrogen Deposition Limits Climate Change Impacts On Carbon Sequestration
Thursday, October 8, 2009 - 12:21
in Earth & Climate
The role of the forests is assumed to increase in the future, as an important buffer of climate change and increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. So-called Earth system models, computer systems making predictions for the globe, estimate that this effect can be very large. However, new research results, based on measurements at hundreds of European forests, indicate that predicted effects by these models are overestimated because they ignore the limitation of nitrogen. It makes the current predictions by Earth system models more than twice as high as they most likely will be.