Plants & Soil Might Be Affected By Future Climate Change: Drier Region, Less Soil Carbon Loss, Wetter Region, Increased Carbon Loss

The Earth's soil is releasing roughly nine times more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than all humans activities combined. While the scientist and policy experts debate the impacts of global warming.

Now scientists have recently monitored that soil carbon loss is more sensitive to climate change compared to carbon taken up by plants. According to them, in the drier region, soil carbon loss decreased but in wetter regions, soil carbon loss increased. Scientists analyzed data from seven climate change experiments across Europe. These result showed that how European shrubland plant biomass and soil carbon loss is affected by summer drought and year-around warming.

As stated by Phys the authors showed that soil carbon loss is most responsive to change in soil water. Soil water plays a vital role on wet soil but drying of the soil removes this limitation resulting in soil carbon loss. In contrast in drier soils reduced rainfall and soil water below the optimum. They also found that soil biota prevents the loss of Carbon dioxide from the soil.

Most of the earth's terrestrial carbon is stored in the soil. The world's soil carbon stocks are estimated to be circa 2000 of carbon. The researchers showed that drought decreases and increases soil carbon more predictably than warming. This data is provided by Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) in collaboration with European and US climate scientists and published in Science Daily.

The experiment has been running 18 years in Clocking forest, a wet welsh upland site with a peat layer. Increasing temperature and drought were imposed on the vegetation to study the effects of climate change on various ecosystem processes.

The new Scientific Reports considers that plant and soil responses to drought and warming conditions only across European shrublands. There are several other biomes in the world where plant and soil responses to climate change could be different. Understanding the responses of plants and soils in other biomes will provide a better understanding of climate change. Simultaneously the effects of global plant and soil interactions feedback to climate will be understood.