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Data · dataset · 2026

A process-model perspective on recent changes in the carbon cycle of North America

Listed in National Center for Atmospheric Research

Continental North America has been found to be a carbon (C) sink over recent decades by multiple studies employing a variety of estimation approaches.

Description

However, several key questions and uncertainties remain with these assessments. Here we used results from an ensemble of 19 state-of-the-art dynamic global vegetation models from the TRENDYv9 project to improve these estimates and study the drivers of its interannual variability.

Our results show that North America has been a C sink with a magnitude of 0.37 +/- 0.38 (mean and one standard deviation) PgC year(-1) for the period 2000-2019 (0.31 and 0.44 PgC year(-1) in each decade); split into 0.18 +/- 0.12 PgC year(-1) in Canada (0.15 and 0.20), 0.16 +/- 0.17 in the United States (0.14 and 0.17), 0.02 +/- 0.05 PgC year(-1) in Mexico (0.02 and 0.02) and 0.01 +/- 0.02 in Central America and the Caribbean (0.01 and 0.01).

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About 57% of the new C assimilated by terrestrial ecosystems is allocated into vegetation, 30% into soils, and 13% into litter. Losses of C due to fire account for 41% of the interannual variability of the mean net biome productivity for all North America in the model ensemble. Finally, we show that drought years (e.g., 2002) have the potential to shift the region to a small net C source in the simulations (-0.02 +/- 0.46 PgC year(-1)).

Our results highlight the importance of identifying the major drivers of the interannual variability of the continental-scale land C cycle along with the spatial distribution of local sink-source dynamics.

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Provenance · 1 source records, 7 field assertions
SourceKeyLast seenRaw
National Center for Atmospheric Research67d852e0-387c-4a5d-9f0e-7daaeb21400f10 d agoJSON v1
FieldAssertionExtractorEvidence
concepts[field].local:field:earth-environmentalmapping · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
concepts[field].local:field:ocean-atmosphericmapping · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
created_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
descriptionsource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0/notes
publication_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
titlesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0/title
updated_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0