The tropical Asian carbon sink

#AsianVegetation; #ClimateChange; #CarbonSink 

Ottawa, Jul 18 (Canadian-Media): The responses of tropical Asian vegetation under scenarios of future climate change was modeled by a study by Scheiter et al. published in Biol. 10.1111/GCB.15217 (2020).

Higher atmospheric carbon dioxide fertilizes tropical evergreen vegetation, making trees grow taller. Photo credit: www.sciencemag.org

Tropical vegetation plays a key role in the global carbon cycle, and much current research focuses on the extent to which it will continue to act as a carbon sink in the coming decades as the climate continues to warm. 

According to the results it was found that  owing to the fertilization effect of increasing carbon dioxide, woody biomass in the region is likely to increase and natural evergreen vegetation will get taller a result that is robust under different climate models until the end of this century.

However, the resulting persistence of a carbon sink also depends on effective conservation measures to ensure that the forest vegetation persists too.

The results suggest that large ensembles of climate models and scenarios are required to assess a wide range of potential future trajectories of vegetation change and to develop robust management plans.

It was also highlighted that open ecosystems with low tree cover as most threatened by climate change, which raise conflicts of interest between biodiversity conservation in open ecosystems and active afforestation to enhance carbon sequestration.