Global greenhouse gas emissions from animal-based foods are twice those of plant-based foods.

Agriculture and land use are major sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but previous estimates were either highly aggregate or provided spatial details for subsectors obtained via different methodologies. Using a model-data integration approach that ensures full consistency between subsectors, we provide spatially explicit estimates of production- and consumption-based GHG emissions worldwide from plant- and animal-based human food in circa 2010. Global GHG emissions from the production of food were found to be 17,318 ± 1,675 TgCOeq yr, of which 57% corresponds to the production of animal-based food (including livestock feed), 29% to plant-based foods and 14% to other utilizations.

Decadal biomass increment in early secondary succession woody ecosystems is increased by CO enrichment.

Increasing atmospheric CO stimulates photosynthesis which can increase net primary production (NPP), but at longer timescales may not necessarily increase plant biomass. Here we analyse the four decade-long CO-enrichment experiments in woody ecosystems that measured total NPP and biomass. CO enrichment increased biomass increment by 1.

Land-use emissions play a critical role in land-based mitigation for Paris climate targets.

Scenarios that limit global warming to below 2 °C by 2100 assume significant land-use change to support large-scale carbon dioxide (CO) removal from the atmosphere by afforestation/reforestation, avoided deforestation, and Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). The more ambitious mitigation scenarios require even greater land area for mitigation and/or earlier adoption of CO removal strategies. Here we show that additional land-use change to meet a 1.

Challenging terrestrial biosphere models with data from the long-term multifactor Prairie Heating and CO Enrichment experiment.

Multifactor experiments are often advocated as important for advancing terrestrial biosphere models (TBMs), yet to date, such models have only been tested against single-factor experiments. We applied 10 TBMs to the multifactor Prairie Heating and CO Enrichment (PHACE) experiment in Wyoming, USA. Our goals were to investigate how multifactor experiments can be used to constrain models and to identify a road map for model improvement.

Gross primary production responses to warming, elevated CO , and irrigation: quantifying the drivers of ecosystem physiology in a semiarid grassland.

Determining whether the terrestrial biosphere will be a source or sink of carbon (C) under a future climate of elevated CO (eCO ) and warming requires accurate quantification of gross primary production (GPP), the largest flux of C in the global C cycle. We evaluated 6 years (2007-2012) of flux-derived GPP data from the Prairie Heating and CO Enrichment (PHACE) experiment, situated in a grassland in Wyoming, USA. The GPP data were used to calibrate a light response model whose basic formulation has been successfully used in a variety of ecosystems.