- 1Institute of Carbon Neutrality, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China
- 2Key Laboratory of Ecosystem Network Observation and Modeling, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
- 3Pioneer Center Land-CRAFT, Department of Agroecology, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark (xcen@agro.au.dk)
- 4Department of Earth System Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
- 5Earth Critical Zone and Flux Research Station of Xing’an Mountains, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Daxing'anling 165200, China
- 6Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, College Park, MD, USA
- 7State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
- 8High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA
- 9Key Laboratory of Vegetation Restoration and Management of Degraded Ecosystems, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Applied Botany, South China Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China
- 10Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA
- 11Research Group PLECO (Plants and Ecosystems), Global Change Ecology Centre of Excellence, Department of Biology, University of Antwerp, 2610 Wilrijk, Belgium
- 12Research Group SUSTAIN (Biobased Sustainability Engineering), Department of Bioscience Engineering, University of Antwerp, 2020 Antwerp, Belgium
- 13Geochemistry and Biogeochemistry Group, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA
- 14Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
- 15Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA
- 16Institute for Meteorology and Climate Research, Atmospheric Environmental Research, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 82467 Garmisch- Partenkirchen, Germany
Soil respiration (SR) is one of the largest land-atmosphere carbon fluxes. Since the industrial revolution, human activities have altered atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition in forests, potentially affecting biotic activities and changing SR. However, this is highly uncertain, as mixed effects of N inputs on SR (i.e., increasing vs. decreasing) were observed in global forests. Here we synthesized data from global N addition experiments to quantitatively analyze how N increases or decreases SR. The revealed patterns were consistent with the observed SR changes across the natural N deposition gradient, providing a general framework to explain the diverse effects of N input on SR in global forests. Using a novel probabilistic approach, we estimated that N deposition decreased SR in 2.9% of global forests, mostly N-saturated forests in eastern China, western Europe, and eastern USA. But the net effect of N deposition increased the global forest SR budget by 5.1% (1.7 PgC yr–1). If N pollution could be effectively controlled, global forest SR and its variability would decrease, thereby reducing the uncertainty in the projected terrestrial carbon dynamics.
How to cite: Cen, X., Vitousek, P., He, N., Bond-Lamberty, B., Niu, S., Du, E., Yu, K., Zheng, M., Raich, J., Van Sundert, K., Paulus, L., He, L., Xu, L., Li, M., and Butterbach-Bahl, K.: A general framework for nitrogen deposition effects on soil respiration in global forests, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-4984, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-4984, 2025.
