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Land stores vast amounts of carbon, but a new study led by Cranfield University s Dr Alice Johnston suggests that how much of this carbon enters the atmosphere as temperatures rise depends on how far that land sits from the equator.
Ecosystems on land are made up of plants, soils, animals, and microbes - all growing, reproducing, dying, and breathing in a common currency; carbon. And how much of that carbon is breathed out (also known as ecosystem respiration) compared to how much is stored (through primary production) has impacts for climate change.
A key concern is that if more carbon is respired than stored, the rate of climate change could accelerate even further. Yet, some big assumptions are made in the models used to predict climate changes - that ecosystem respiration rises with temperature at the same rate (doubles for a temperature rise of 10 °C) irrespective of the ecosystem itself. A new study Temperature thresholds to ecosystem respiration at a global sc