An international team of researchers has found plants in the tropics absorb much less carbon dioxide than previous modelling had suggested, which has implications for management of ecosystems.
The University of Western Australia’s Dr Michael Bertolacci was co-author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which was led by the Earth Observing Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the United States.
Dr Bertolacci, from UWA’s School of Physics, Mathematics and Computing, leads a team of Australian researchers at the Wollongong Methodology for Bayesian Assimilate of Trace-gases (WOMBAT), which contributes to an ongoing project coordinated by NASA to estimate how much CO2 is emitted and absorbed into the atmosphere around the globe.
“Plants and other organisms are exchanging CO2 with the atmosphere all the time and it’s impossible to measure these exchanges everywhere,” Dr Bertolacci said.
“Instead, we measure how much CO2 is in the air and trace it back through the winds to find where it came from.”
The WOMBAT team’s findings from the NASA project, along with those from other teams around the world, were combined with independent ocean and fossil-fuel flux estimates and new aircraft observations of CO2 made near the tropics.
“The results showed the tropics seem to absorb less carbon than many other studies and models predicted and may even be close to neutral in their carbon exchanges,” Dr Bertolacci said.
“The finding is important because we need to know the ecosystems that help us fight climate change by absorbing more carbon and those releasing more CO2.
“It also highlights the value new measurement campaigns can make to understand the carbon cycle, which is particularly important at a time when funding for carbon cycle science is at a globally low ebb.
“Ongoing support for this type of work is crucial to allow the scientific community to provide accurate information about the carbon cycle and climate change.”
