Using research networks to create the comprehensive datasets needed to assess nutrient availability as a key determinant of terrestrial carbon cycling

Nonetheless, our understanding of nutrient controls remains far from complete and poorly quantified, at least partly due to a lack of informative, comparable, and accessible datasets at regional-to-global scales. A growing research infrastructure of multi-site networks are providing valuable data on C fluxes and stocks and are monitoring their responses to global environmental change and measuring responses to experimental treatments.

These networks thus provide an opportunity for improving our understanding of C-nutrient cycle interactions and our ability to model them. However, coherent information on how nutrient cycling interacts with observed C cycle patterns is still generally lacking. Here, we argue that complementing available C-cyclemeasurements from monitoring and experimental sites with data characterizing nutrient availability will greatly enhance their power and will improve our capacity to forecast future trajectories of terrestrial C cycling and climate.