Highlight articles

This page features highlight articles from EGU's open access journals Biogeosciences, Geoscientific Model Development and SOIL. These articles of particular interest are selected by journal editors.

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ESM-SnowMIP: assessing snow models and quantifying snow-related climate feedbacks

This paper provides an overview of a coordinated international experiment to determine the strengths and weaknesses in how climate models treat snow. The models will be assessed at point locations using high-quality reference measurements and globally using satellite-derived datasets. How well climate models simulate snow-related processes is important because changing snow cover is an important part of the global climate system and provides an important freshwater resource for human use.

Distribution and cycling of terrigenous dissolved organic carbon in peatland-draining rivers and coastal waters of Sarawak, Borneo

The carbon cycle is a key control for the Earth’s climate. Every year rivers deliver a lot of organic carbon to coastal seas, but we do not know what happens to this carbon, particularly in the tropics. We show that rivers in Borneo deliver carbon from peat swamps to the sea with at most minimal biological or chemical alteration in estuaries, but sunlight can rapidly oxidise this carbon to CO₂. This means that south-east Asian seas are likely hotspots of terrestrial carbon decomposition.

Spatial assessments of soil organic carbon for stakeholder decision-making – a case study from Kenya

SOIL
DOI 10.5194/soil-4-259-2018
7 November 2018

Land degradation impacts the health and livelihoods of about 1.5 billion people worldwide. The state of the environment and food security are strongly interlinked in tropical landscapes. This paper demonstrates the integration of soil organic carbon (SOC) and land health maps with socioeconomic datasets into an online, open-access platform called the Resilience Diagnostic and Decision Support Tool for Turkana County in Kenya.

Predominance of methanogens over methanotrophs in rewetted fens characterized by high methane emissions

Rewetting drained peatlands may lead to prolonged emission of the greenhouse gas methane, but the underlying factors are not well described. In this study, we found two rewetted fens with known high methane fluxes had a high ratio of microbial methane producers to methane consumers and a low abundance of methane consumers compared to pristine wetlands. We therefore suggest abundances of methane-cycling microbes as potential indicators for prolonged high methane emissions in rewetted peatlands.

Contrasting biosphere responses to hydrometeorological extremes: revisiting the 2010 western Russian heatwave

Northern forests enhanced their productivity during and before the 2010 Russian mega heatwave. We scrutinize this issue with a novel type of multivariate extreme event detection approach. Forests compensate for 54 % of the carbon losses in agricultural ecosystems due to vulnerable conditions in spring and better water management in summer. The findings highlight the importance of forests in mitigating climate change, while not alleviating the consequences of extreme events for food security.

Reviews and syntheses: Carbon use efficiency from organisms to ecosystems – definitions, theories, and empirical evidence

Carbon fixed by plants and phytoplankton through photosynthesis is ultimately stored in soils and sediments or released to the atmosphere during decomposition of dead biomass. Carbon-use efficiency is a useful metric to quantify the fate of carbon – higher efficiency means higher storage and lower release to the atmosphere. Here we summarize many definitions of carbon-use efficiency and study how this metric changes from organisms to ecosystems and from terrestrial to aquatic environments.

Potential for phenol biodegradation in cloud waters

Biogeosciences
DOI 10.5194/bg-15-5733-2018
28 September 2018

The main objective of this work was to evaluate the potential degradation of phenol, a highly toxic pollutant, by cloud microorganisms. Phenol concentrations measured on five cloud samples collected at the PUY station in France were from 0.15 to 0.74 µg L⁻¹. Metatranscriptomic analysis suggested that phenol could be biodegraded directly in clouds, likely by Gammaproteobacteria. A large screening showed that 93 % of 145 bacterial strains isolated from clouds were able to degrade phenol.

Tracing water masses with ¹²⁹I and ²³⁶U in the subpolar North Atlantic along the GEOTRACES GA01 section

Biogeosciences
DOI 10.5194/bg-15-5545-2018
18 September 2018

The investigation of water mass transport pathways and timescales is important to understand the global ocean circulation. Following earlier studies, we use artificial radionuclides introduced to the oceans in the 1950s to investigate the water transport in the subpolar North Atlantic (SPNA). For the first time, we combine measurements of the long-lived iodine-129 and uranium-236 to confirm earlier findings/hypotheses and to better understand shallow and deep ventilation processes in the SPNA.

sympl (v. 0.4.0) and climt (v. 0.15.3) – towards a flexible framework for building model hierarchies in Python

In the same way that the fruit fly or the yeast cell serve as model systems in biology, climate scientists use a range of computer models to gain a fundamental understanding of our climate system. These models range from extremely simple models that can run on your phone to those that require supercomputers. Sympl and climt are packages that make it easy for climate scientists to build a hierarchy of such models using Python, which facilitates easy to read and self-documenting models.

Integrated management of a Swiss cropland is not sufficient to preserve its soil carbon pool in the long term

It is of great interest to know whether croplands act as a net source or sink of atmospheric CO₂and if soil carbon © stocks are preserved over long timescales due to the role of C in soil fertility. For a cropland in Switzerland it was found that managing the field under the Swiss framework of the Proof of Ecological Performance (PEP) resulted in soil C losses of 18.0 %. Additional efforts are needed to bring Swiss management practices closer to the goal of preserving soil C in the long term.

BG Biogeosciences Highlight articles