What Is the Role of the Eurasian Forests Under a Warming Climate?

Martin Heimann

The Eurasian forests are an important component in the earth’s climate system: Forests contain a lot of carbon in the vegetation and in the soil. But their role under warming conditions is still unclear – on the one hand, a higher CO2 level in the air acts like a fertilizer for plants that grow and thus store more CO2 in the form of carbon. On the other hand, microbes that like warmer temperatures bring the soil to decompose faster and release even more CO2 and methane. To monitor long-term biogeochemical changes, a German-Russian research collaboration established an observatory in the Siberian taiga. Since 2006, the regional effects of global warming are studied from the Zotino Tall Tower Observatory. As MARTIN HEIMANN explains in this video, two of the main findings of the long-term measurements are that currently the western Siberian forests store more carbon than they release. However, due to the many bogs the region is also a source of methane, another important greenhouse gas.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21036/LTPUB10213

Researcher

Martin Heimann is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, and Honorary Professor at Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena. He is a member of the Academia Europaea and was appointed Guest Professor at the University of Helsinki. Heimann’s research focuses on the biogeochemistry of the global carbon cycle. A major part of his research is dedicated to long-term measurements of biogeochemical changes in the Eurasian forests, and their role in the earth’s climate system. Heimann contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry

The research is dedicated to the study of global biogeochemical cycles and their long-term interactions with the biosphere, the atmosphere, the geosphere and the entire climate system. We want to better understand how living organisms - including humans - exchange basic resources such as water, carbon, nitrogen and energy with their environment and how this affects global climate and ecosystems. Biogeochemistry is the science of the Earth's metabolism. Elements essential to life such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus are constantly undergoing biological, chemical and physical transformations as they are exchanged between different parts of the Earth, the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and atmosphere. The "biogeochemical cycles" quantitatively describe the distribution and exchange of elements between these components of the Earth system.