Ana Bastos

• PhD
• Group Leader at Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry

In the last decade, Europe has been stricken by two outstanding heatwaves, the 2003 event in western Europe and the 2010 episode over Russia. Both events were characterized by record-breaking temperatures and widespread socio-economic impacts, including significant increments on human mortality, decreases in crop yields and in hydroelectric product...

Large-scale climate patterns control variability in the global carbon sink. In Europe, the North-Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) influences vegetation activity, however the East-Atlantic (EA) pattern is known to modulate NAO strength and location. Using observation-driven and modelled data sets, we show that multi-annual variability patterns of European...

The year 2015 was, at the time, the warmest since 1880, and many regions in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) registered record breaking annual temperatures. Simultaneously, a remarkable and widespread growing season greening was observed over most of the NH in the record from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) normalized differen...

The Global Carbon Budget 2018 (GCB2018) estimated by the atmospheric CO growth rate, fossil fuel emissions, and modeled (bottom‐up) land and ocean fluxes cannot be fully closed, leading to a “budget imbalance,” highlighting uncertainties in GCB components. However, no systematic analysis has been performed on which regions or processes contribute t...

In 2018 and 2019, central Europe was stricken by two consecutive extreme dry and hot summers (DH2018 and DH2019). The DH2018 had severe impacts on ecosystems and likely affected vegetation activity in the subsequent year, for example though depletion of carbon reserves or damage from drought. Such legacies from drought and heat stress can further i...

Northern ecosystems (≥ 30° N) have been accumulating vegetation biomass carbon in recent decades, but increasing droughts and wildfires threaten this carbon sink. Here, we analyse annual changes in live vegetation biomass in northern ecosystems using low-frequency microwave satellite observations at 25 km spatial resolution from 2010 to 2022. We fi...

This review of recent advances in biosphere research aims to provide information on eight selected themes related to changes in biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, social and economic interactions with ecosystems, and the impacts of climate change on the biosphere. An interdisciplinary panel of experts selected these eight themes from a public sur...

Global estimates of the terrestrial land-atmosphere flux of CO2 (NEE) from data-driven models differ widely depending on their underlying data and methodology. Bottom-up models trained on eddy-covariance data are most informative at the ecosystem-level. Top-down models, such as atmospheric inversions, produce regional and global results consistent...

The global land carbon sink has increased since the preindustrial period, driven by increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration and climate change. However, detecting these anthropogenic signals in the global land carbon sink is challenging due to the large year-to-year variability, which can mask or amplify long-term trends, particularly on regional...

Land use and land cover changes have altered terrestrial ecosystem carbon storage, but their impacts on ecosystem sensitivity to drought and temperature fluctuations have not been evaluated spatially over the globe. We estimate drought and temperature sensitivities of ecosystems using vegetation greenness from satellite observations and vegetation...

The high growth rate of atmospheric CO2 in 2023 was found to be caused by a severe reduction of the global net land carbon sink. Here we update the global CO2 budget from January 1st to July 1st 2024, during which El Ni\~no drought conditions continued to prevail in the Tropics but ceased by March 2024. We used three dynamic global vegetation model...

Accurate accounting of greenhouse‐gas (GHG) emissions and removals is central to tracking progress toward climate mitigation and for monitoring potential climate‐change feedbacks. GHG budgeting and reporting can follow either the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change methodologies for National Greenhouse Gas Inventory (NGHGI) reporting or use a...

In this study, we provide an update on the methodology and data used by Deng et al. (2022) to compare the national greenhouse gas inventories (NGHGIs) and atmospheric inversion model ensembles contributed by international research teams coordinated by the Global Carbon Project. The comparison framework uses transparent processing of the net ecosyst...

This study provides the first comprehensive quantification of three major greenhouse gases (GHGs, including CO2, CH4, and N2O) budgets for Central and West Asia (CWA) from 2000 to 2020, including contributions from fossil fuels, industry, and managed and unmanaged terrestrial ecosystems. We use bottom‐up (BU: inventories and process‐based models) a...

Accurately describing the distribution of CO2 ${\text{CO}}_{2}$ in the atmosphere with atmospheric tracer transport models is essential for greenhouse gas monitoring and verification support systems to aid implementation of international climate agreements. Large deep neural networks are poised to revolutionize weather prediction, which requires 3D...

The Amazon forest is fire sensitive, but, where fires were uncommon as a natural disturbance, deforestation and drought are accelerating fire occurrences, which threaten the integrity of the tropical forest, the carbon cycle and air quality. Fire emissions depend on fuel amount and type, moisture conditions and burning behaviour. Higher-resolution...

In 2023, the biogeographic Amazon experienced temperature anomalies of 1.5°C above the 1991-2020 average from September to November. These conditions were driven by high sea surface temperature in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, together with reduced moisture advection from the Atlantic, causing large vapor pressure and water deficits in the secon...

In fire‐prone regions such as the Mediterranean biome, fire seasons are becoming longer, and fires are becoming more frequent and severe. Post‐fire recovery dynamics is a key component of ecosystem resilience and stability. Even though Mediterranean ecosystems can tolerate high exposure to extreme temperatures and recover from fire, changes in clim...

The Earth is greening in many regions due to increased temperature, higher atmospheric CO 2 concentration, and land use change. However, while climate change has been accelerating, greening has not kept pace in many regions. Here, we show that decreasing water availability and increasing atmospheric water demand are regionally coinciding with brown...

Large stocks of soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) in northern permafrost soils are vulnerable to remobilization under climate change. However, there are large uncertainties in present‐day greenhouse gas (GHG) budgets. We compare bottom‐up (data‐driven upscaling and process‐based models) and top‐down (atmospheric inversion models) budgets of carbon d...

In 2023, the CO2 growth rate was 3.37 ± 0.11 ppm at Mauna Loa, which was 86% above that of the previous year and hit a record high since observations began in 1958, while global fossil fuel CO2 emissions only increased by 0.6% ± 0.5%. This implies an unprecedented weakening of land and ocean sinks, and raises the question of where and why this redu...

The sensitivity of atmospheric CO 2 growth rate to tropical temperature (γ T ) has almost doubled between 1959 and 2011, a trend that has been linked to increasing drought in the tropics. However, γ T has declined since then. Understanding whether these variations in γ T reflect forced changes or internal climate variability in the carbon cycle is...

As extreme event attribution (EEA) matures, explaining the impacts of extreme events has risen to be a key focus for attribution scientists. Studies of this type usually assess the contribution of anthropogenic climate change to observed impacts. Other scientific communities have developed tools to assess how human activities influence impacts of e...

Heat stress occurs when plants experience temperature beyond their normal optimum and can disrupt cell functioning and growth. Exposure to extreme heat results in reduced plant productivity and can have lagged effects through accelerated leaf senescence Teskey et al (2014) Rao et al (2023). Few studies exist on evaluation of impact of heat stress a...

Accurately describing the distribution of CO$_2$ in the atmosphere with atmospheric tracer transport models is essential for greenhouse gas monitoring and verification support systems to aid implementation of international climate agreements. Large deep neural networks are poised to revolutionize weather prediction, which requires 3D modeling of th...

This review of recent advances in biosphere research aims to provide information on selected issues related to changes in biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, social and economic interactions with ecosystems, and the impacts of climate change on the biosphere. We highlight advances on nine themes that have been recently published in peer-reviewed j...

In the framework of the RECCAP2 initiative, we present the greenhouse gas (GHG) and carbon (C) budget of Europe. For the decade of the 2010s, we present a bottom‐up (BU) estimate of GHG net‐emissions of 3.9 Pg CO2‐eq. yr⁻¹ (using a global warming potential on a 100 years horizon), which are largely dominated by fossil fuel emissions. In this decade...

The terrestrial biosphere plays a major role in the global carbon cycle, and there is a recognized need for regularly updated estimates of land‐atmosphere exchange at regional and global scales. An international ensemble of Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs), known as the “Trends and drivers of the regional scale terrestrial sources and sinks...

In 2023, the CO2 growth rate was 3.37 +/- 0.11 ppm at Mauna Loa, 86% above the previous year, and hitting a record high since observations began in 1958, while global fossil fuel CO2 emissions only increased by 0.6 +/- 0.5%. This implies an unprecedented weakening of land and ocean sinks, and raises the question of where and why this reduction happ...

The carbon uptake period (CUP) refers to the time of each year during which the rate of photosynthetic uptake surpasses that of respiration in the terrestrial biosphere, resulting in a net absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere to the land. Since climate drivers influence both photosynthesis and respiration, the CUP offers valuable insights into how...

In this study, we provide an update of the methodology and data used by Deng et al. (2022) to compare the national greenhouse gas inventories (NGHGIs) and atmospheric inversion model ensembles contributed by international research teams coordinated by the Global Carbon Project. The comparison framework uses transparent processing of the net ecosyst...

Soil is central to the complex interplay among biodiversity, climate, and society. This paper examines the interconnectedness of soil biodiversity, climate change, and societal impacts, emphasizing the urgent need for integrated solutions. Human‐induced biodiversity loss and climate change intensify environmental degradation, threatening human well...

Climate extremes are on the rise. Impacts of extreme climate and weather events on ecosystem services and ultimately human well‐being can be partially attenuated by the organismic, structural, and functional diversity of the affected land surface. However, the ongoing transformation of terrestrial ecosystems through intensified exploitation and man...

Monitoring forest carbon (C) stocks is essential to better assess their role in the global carbon balance, and to better model and predict long-term trends and inter-annual variability in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. On a national scale, national forest inventories (NFIs) can provide estimates of forest carbon stocks, but these estimates are onl...

In the framework of the RECCAP2 initiative, we present the greenhouse gas (GHG) and carbon (C) budget of Europe. For the decade of the 2010s, we present a bottom-up (BU) estimate of GHG net-emissions of 3.9 Pg CO2-eq. yr-1 (global warming potential on 100 year horizon), and are largely dominated by fossil fuel emissions. In this decade, terrestrial...

The northern permafrost region has been projected to shift from a net sink to a net source of carbon under global warming. However, estimates of the contemporary net greenhouse gas (GHG) balance and budgets of the permafrost region remain highly uncertain. Here, we construct the first comprehensive bottom‐up budgets of CO2, CH4, and N2O across the...

Changing climate, especially the increase in frequency and intensity of extreme events such as heat waves and droughts, poses a significant challenge to the biosphere, threatening biodiversity overall and specifically exacerbating tree mortality. Countermeasures and management actions often prove insufficient due to delayed visual indicators of tre...

While the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 mole fractions can be measured with high accuracy, there are still large uncertainties in its attribution to specific regions and diverse anthropogenic and natural sources and sinks. A major source of uncertainty is the net flux of carbon dioxide from the biosphere to the atmosphere, the net ecosystem exchan...

East Asia (China, Japan, Koreas, and Mongolia) has been the world's economic engine over at least the past two decades, exhibiting a rapid increase in fossil fuel emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and has expressed the recent ambition to achieve climate neutrality by mid‐century. However, the GHG balance of its terrestrial ecosystems remains poo...

The reduction of CO2 emissions and the enhancement of CO2 removals related to land use are considered essential for future pathways towards net-zero emissions and mitigating climate change. With the growing pressure under global climate treaties, country-level land-use CO2 flux data are becoming increasingly important. So far, country-level estimat...

The Amazon is the largest continuous tropical forest in the world and plays a key role in the global carbon cycle. Human-induced disturbances and climate change have impacted the Amazon carbon balance. Here we conduct a comprehensive synthesis of existing state-of-the-art estimates of the contemporary land carbon fluxes in the Amazon using a set of...

The gross primary production (GPP) of the terrestrial biosphere is a key source of variability in the global carbon cycle. It is modulated by hydrometeorological drivers (i.e. short-wave radiation, air temperature, vapour pressure deficit and soil moisture) and the vegetation state (i.e. canopy greenness, leaf area index) at instantaneous to intera...

Non-technical summary We identify a set of essential recent advances in climate change research with high policy relevance, across natural and social sciences: (1) looming inevitability and implications of overshooting the 1.5°C warming limit, (2) urgent need for a rapid and managed fossil fuel phase-out, (3) challenges for scaling carbon dioxide r...

Drought events are projected to become more severe and frequent across many regions in the future, but their impacts will likely differ among ecosystems depending on their ability to maintain functioning during droughts, i.e., ecosystem resistance. Plant species have diverse strategies to cope with drought. As a result, divergent responses of diffe...

Droughts can impact terrestrial ecosystems concurrently but also lagged in time as legacy effects. Although drought legacy effects on plants have been thoroughly shown using tree radial growth and greenness, understanding of legacy effects on gross primary productivity (GPP) remains limited. Here, we quantify for the first time drought legacy effec...

Projections of future carbon sinks and stocks are important because they show how the world's ecosystems will respond to elevated CO2 and changes in climate. Moreover, they are crucial to inform policy decisions around emissions reductions to stay within the global warming levels identified by the Paris Agreement. However, Earth System Models from...

Uncovering the mechanisms that lead to Amazon forest resilience variations is crucial to predict the impact of future climatic and anthropogenic disturbances. Here, we apply a previously used empirical resilience metrics, lag‐1 month temporal autocorrelation (TAC), to vegetation optical depth data in C‐band (a good proxy of the whole canopy water c...

Vegetation plays a fundamental role in modulating the exchange of water, energy, and carbon fluxes between the land and the atmosphere. These exchanges are modeled by Land Surface Models (LSMs), which are an essential part of numerical weather prediction and data assimilation. However, most current LSMs implemented specifically in weather forecasti...

The year 2022 saw record breaking temperatures in Europe during both summer and fall. Similar to the recent 2018 drought, close to 30% (3.0 million km²) of the European continent was under severe summer drought. In 2022, the drought was located in central and southeastern Europe, contrasting the Northern-centered 2018 drought. We show, using multip...

The northern permafrost region has been projected to shift from a net sink to a net source of carbon under global warming. However, estimates of the contemporary net greenhouse gas (GHG) balance and budgets of the permafrost region remain highly uncertain. Here we construct the first comprehensive bottom-up budgets of CO2, CH4, and N2O across the t...

Climate extremes are on the rise. Impacts of extreme climate and weather events on ecosystem services and ultimately human well-being can be partially attenuated by the organismic, structural, and functional diversity of the affected land surface. However, the ongoing transformation of terrestrial ecosystems through intensified exploitation and man...

The northern permafrost region has been projected to shift from a net sink to a net source of carbon under global warming. However, estimates of the contemporary net greenhouse gas (GHG) balance and budgets of the permafrost region remain highly uncertain. Here we construct the first comprehensive bottom-up budgets of CO, CH, and NO across the terr...

The long-term net sink of carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the northern permafrost region is projected to weaken or shift under climate change. But large uncertainties remain, even on present-day GHG budgets. We compare bottom-up (data-driven upscaling, process-based models) and top-down budgets (atmospheric inversion models)...

While numerous studies report shifts in vegetation phenology, in this regard eddy covariance (EC) data, despite its continuous high-frequency observations, still requires further exploration. Furthermore, there is no general consensus on optimal methodologies for data smoothing and extracting phenological transition dates (PTDs). Here, we revisit e...

Insect and disease outbreaks in forests are biotic disturbances that can profoundly alter ecosystem dynamics. In many parts of the world, these disturbance regimes are intensifying as the climate changes and shifts the distribution of species and biomes. As a result, key forest ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration, regulation of water f...

The reduction of CO2 emissions and the enhancement of CO2 removals related to land use are considered essential for future pathways towards net-zero emissions and mitigating climate change. With the growing pressure under global climate treaties, country-level land use CO2 flux data are becoming increasingly important. So far, country-level estimat...

Land-based mitigation is essential in reducing net carbon emissions. Yet, the attribution of carbon fluxes remains highly uncertain, in particular for the forest-rich region of Eastern Europe (incl. Western Russia). Here we integrate various data sources to show that Eastern Europe accounted for an above-ground biomass carbon sink of~0.41 gigatons...

High-quality, long-time-series measurements of atmospheric greenhouse gases show interannual variability in the measured seasonal cycles. These changes can be analyzed to better understand the carbon cycle and the impact of climate drivers. However, nearly all discrete measurement records contain gaps and have noise due to the influence of local fl...

The gross primary production (GPP) of the terrestrial biosphere is a key source of variability in the global carbon cycle. It is modulated by hydrometeorological drivers (i.e., shortwave radiation, air temperature, vapor pressure deficit and soil moisture) and the vegetation state (i.e., canopy greenness, leaf area index) at instantaneous to intera...

East Asia (China, Japan, Koreas and Mongolia) has been the world’s economic engine over at least the past two decades, exhibiting a rapid increase in fossil fuel emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and has expressed the recent ambition to achieve climate neutrality by mid-century. However, the GHG balance of its terrestrial ecosystems remains poor...

While the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 mole fractions can be measured with high accuracy, there are still large uncertainties in the attribution of this growth to diverse anthropogenic and natural sources and sinks. One major source of uncertainty is the net flux of carbon dioxide from the biosphere to the atmosphere, the Net Ecosystem Exchange (...

Numerous studies report shifts in vegetation phenology, however, in this regard eddy covariance (EC) data is still not fully exploited despite their continuous high-frequency observations. Moreover, there is no general consensus on optimal methodologies for data smoothing and extracting phenological transition dates (PTDs). Here, we revisit existin...

Land-based mitigation is essential in reducing carbon emissions. Yet, the attribution of land carbon fluxes to their sinks and sources remains highly uncertain, in particular for the forest-rich but data-poor region of Eastern Europe. Here we integrate various data sources (from top-down and bottom-up modelling, earth observation, inventories) to s...

The year 2022 saw record breaking temperatures in Europe during both summer and fall. Close to 30% of the European continent was under severe summer drought with a similarly large area affected (3.0 million km ² ) as during the recent 2018 drought, but now located in central and southeastern Europe. Multiple sets of observations suggest a reduction...

Vegetation plays a fundamental role in modulating the exchange of water, energy, and carbon fluxes between the land and the atmosphere. These exchanges are modelled by Land Surface Models (LSMs), which are an essential part of numerical weather prediction and data assimilation. However, most current LSMs implemented specifically in weather forecast...

The frequency of heatwaves, droughts and their co‐occurrence vary greatly in simulations of different climate models. Since these extremes are expected to become more frequent with climate change, it is important to understand how vegetation models respond to different climatologies in heatwave and drought occurrence. In previous work, six climate...

Drought events are projected to become more severe and frequent across many regions in the future, but their impacts will likely differ among ecosystems depending on their ability to maintain functioning during droughts, i.e., ecosystem resistance. Plant species have diverse strategies to cope with drought. As a result, divergent responses of diffe...

The Amazon is the largest continuous tropical forest in the world and plays a key role in the global carbon cycle. Human-induced disturbances and climate change have impacted the Amazon carbon balance. Here we conduct a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art estimates of the contemporary land carbon fluxes in the Amazon. Over the whole Amazon r...

Forests account for nearly 90 % of the world's terrestrial biomass in the form of carbon and they support 80 % of the global biodiversity. To understand the underlying forest dynamics, we need a long-term but also relatively high-frequency, networked monitoring system, as traditionally used in meteorology or hydrology. While there are numerous exis...

Siberian forests are generally thought to have acted as an important carbon sink over recent decades, but exposure to severe droughts and fire disturbances may have impacted their carbon dynamics. Limited available forest inventories mean the carbon balance remains uncertain. Here we analyse annual live and dead above-ground carbon changes derived...

Enough of silos: develop a joint scientific agenda to understand the intertwined global crises of the Earth system. Enough of silos: develop a joint scientific agenda to understand the intertwined global crises of the Earth system.

In the Amazon, deforestation and climate change lead to increased vulnerability to forest degradation, threatening its existing carbon stocks and its capacity as a carbon sink. We use satellite L‐Band Vegetation Optical Depth (L‐VOD) data that provide an integrated (top‐down) estimate of biomass carbon to track changes over 2011–2019. Because the s...

One of the least understood temporal scales of global carbon cycle (C-cycle) dynamics is its interannual variability (IAV). This variability is mainly driven by variations in the local climatic drivers of terrestrial ecosystem activity, which in turn are controlled by large-scale modes of atmospheric variability. Here, we quantify the fraction of g...

Plant water stress occurs at the point when soil moisture (SM) limits transpiration, defining a critical SM threshold ( crit). Knowledge of the spatial distribution of  crit is crucial for future projections of climate and water resources. Here, we use global eddy covariance observations to quantify  crit and evaporative fraction (EF) regimes. T...

Accurate subseasonal weather forecasts, from 2 weeks up to a season, can help reduce costs and impacts related to weather and corresponding extremes. The quality of weather forecasts has improved considerably in recent decades as models represent more details of physical processes, and they benefit from assimilating comprehensive Earth observation...