Strong isoprene emission response to temperature in tundra vegetation

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

Documents

  • Fulltext

    Final published version, 1.23 MB, PDF document

Emissions of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) are a crucial component of biosphere–atmosphere interactions. In northern latitudes, climate change is amplified by feedback processes in which BVOCs have a recognized, yet poorly quantified role, mainly due to a lack of measurements and concomitant modeling gaps. Hence, current Earth system models mostly rely on temperature responses measured on vegetation from lower latitudes, rendering their predictions highly uncertain. Here, we show how tundra isoprene emissions respond vigorously to temperature increases, compared to model results. Our unique dataset of direct eddy covariance ecosystem-level isoprene measurements in two contrasting ecosystems exhibited Q10 (the factor by which the emission rate increases with a 10 °C rise in temperature) temperature coefficients of up to 20.8, that is, 3.5 times the Q10 of 5.9 derived from the equivalent model calculations. Crude estimates using the observed temperature responses indicate that tundra vegetation could enhance their isoprene emissions by up to 41% (87%)—that is, 46% (55%) more than estimated by models—with a 2 °C (4 °C) warming. Our results demonstrate that tundra vegetation possesses the potential to substantially boost its isoprene emissions in response to future rising temperatures, at rates that exceed the current Earth system model predictions.
Original languageEnglish
Article numbere2118014119
JournalPNAS
Volume119
Issue number38
Number of pages7
ISSN0027-8424
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Bibliographical note

CENPERMOA[2022]

Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk


No data available

ID: 319415289