An international team -where Josep Peñuelas has participated- explores the factors that most affect plant behavior and how they can be included in predictive models to improve them. The result, published in Nature Plants wants to improve understanding of the global carbon cycle and ecosystem services and their future if forests change due to climate change.
Since mid-2020 CREAF has been a member of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER), a global association of research, professionals and community leaders from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, New Zealand and North and South America, which is actively involved in the ecological recovery of degraded ecosystems, using a wide range of experience and knowledge.
Half of the world’s cropland could be used for other purposes if agricultural efficiency were improved through high-yield farming. That would mean making 576 million hectares of land available, more than 10 times the area of Spain (approximately 50 million hectares).
According to the study in which CREAF participated, China contributes 43% of this amount. For decades it had been thought that human activities were responsible for only around 5% of atmospherically-circulating phosphorus. More phosphorus in the air means more phosphors deposited on the ground. This can boost plant growth and the capacity to sequester atmospheric CO2; for that reason human activities may be altering the phosphorus and carbon cycles to a degree which was previously unknown
The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, showed that forests growing in fertile soils with ample nutrients are able to sequester about 30% of the carbon that they take up during photosynthesis. In contrast, forests growing in nutrient-poor soils may retain only 6% of that carbon. The rest is returned to the atmosphere as respiration.
