Field tested: Grasslands won’t help buffer climate change

Because grasslands and forests operate in complex feedback loops with both the atmosphere and soil, understanding how ecosystems respond to global changes in climate and element cycling is critical to predicting the range of global environmental changes–and attendant ecosystem responses–likely to occur.

In a new study in the premier open access journal PLoS Biology Jeffrey Dukes, Christopher Field, and colleagues treated grassland plots to every possible combination of current or increased levels of four environmental factors–CO2, temperature, precipitation, and nitrogen influx–to simulate likely regional changes over the next 100 years. The results of their long-term experiment reveal that California grasslands, and ecosystems that respond similarly, are not likely to help buffer the rate of climate change by acting as a carbon “sink”–slowing the rise of CO2 levels by storing more carbon in new growth.

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