Guocheng Wang

Beijing Normal University | bnu · Faculty of Geographical Science

Plain Language Summary Soil contains a lot of carbon, and its levels can change based on climate and how we manage the land. Our global soil research shows that when new carbon goes into the soil, about 25% of it leaves within a year, regardless of depth. After 30 years, only about 13% remains. Interestingly, most of the carbon in the soil is older...

Soils store large quantities of carbon in the subsoil (below 0.2 m depth) that is generally old and believed to be stabilized over centuries to millennia, which suggests that subsoil carbon sequestration (CS) can be used as a strategy for climate change mitigation. In this article, we review the main biophysical processes that contribute to carbon...

Co-optimization of multiple management practices may facilitate climate-smart agriculture, but is challenged by complex climate–crop–soil management interconnections across space and over time. Here we develop a hybrid approach combining agricultural system modelling, machine learning and life cycle assessment to spatiotemporally co-optimize fertil...

Aim: This study aimed to infer the allocation of belowground net primary productivity (BNPP) to sequential soil depths down to 2 m across the globe at a 1 km resolution and assess underlying environmental drivers. Location: Global. Time Period: Contemporary (1932-2017). Major Taxa Studied: Terrestrial plants. Methods: Global datasets including...

Background Air pollution in China has raised great concerns due to its adverse effects on air quality, human health, and climate. Emissions of air pollutants (APs) are inherently linked with CO2 emissions through fossil-energy consumption. Knowledge of the characteristics of APs and CO2 emissions and their relationships is fundamentally important i...

Plant root-derived carbon (C) inputs (Iroot) are the primary source of C in mineral bulk soil. However, a fraction of Iroot may lose quickly (Iloss, e.g., via rhizosphere microbial respiration, leaching and fauna feeding) without contributing to long-term bulk soil C storage, yet this loss has never been quantified, particularly on a global scale....

Aboveground biomass (AGB) in managed grasslands can vary across a suite of environmental and management conditions; however, there lacks a quantitative assessment at the national scale of China. Although the potential effects of individual drivers (e.g., species, nutrient fertilization, and water management) have been examined in China’s managed gr...

Process-based agricultural system models are a major tool for assessing climate-agriculture-management interactions. However, their application across large scales is limited by computational cost, model uncertainty, and data availability, hindering policy-making for sustainable agricultural production at the scale meaningful for land management by...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) changes under future climate warming are difficult to quantify in situ. Here we apply an innovative approach combining space-for-time substitution with meta-analysis to SOC measurements in 113,013 soil profiles across the globe to estimate the effect of future climate warming on steady-state SOC stocks. We find that SOC st...

Globally, soil is one of the largest terrestrial carbon reservoirs, with soil organic carbon (SOC) regulating overall soil carbon dynamics. Robust quantification of SOC stocks in existing global observation-based estimates avails accurate predictions in carbon climate feedbacks and future climate trends. In this study, we investigated global and re...

Particulate (POC) and mineral-associated organic carbon (MOC) are measurable carbon pools with distinct function. Their turnover properties have been rarely assessed because of their contrasting stabilization and destabilization processes and the difficulty of in situ monitoring. In this study we used two carbon models (a three-pool and a four-pool...

Soil carbon (C) is comprised of a continuum of organic compounds with distinct ages (i.e., the time a C atom has experienced in soil since the C atom entered soil). The contribution of different age groups to soil C efflux is critical for understanding soil C stability and persistence, but is poorly understood due to the complexity of soil C pool a...

Energy consumption dominates annual CO2 emissions in China. It is essential to significantly reduce CO2 emissions from energy consumption to reach national carbon neutrality by 2060, while the role of terrestrial carbon sequestration in offsetting energy-related CO2 emissions cannot be underestimated. Natural climate solutions (NCS), including the...

Under global climate change, particularly warming, plant phenology may vary significantly thereby influencing a series of ecosystem functionalities. However, observational evidences of the variation of plant phenology and its association with climate change in temperate grassland are limited. In this study, we collated plant phenological records du...

Increasing carbon input (CI) to soil has been widely recommended (e.g., residue retention and manure application) to sequester more carbon in agricultural soils thereby mitigating climate change and improving soil quality. However, carbon sequestration may not respond linearly to additional CI due to their active interactions with the turnover of n...

Background: Air pollution in China has raised great concerns due to its adverse effects on air quality, human health, and climate. Emissions of air pollutants (APs) are inherently linked with CO2 emissions through fossil-energy consumption. Knowledge of the characteristics of APs and CO2 emissions and their relationships is fundamentally important...

Plain Language Summary Low temperature in winter (i.e., chilling) is recognized as an important regulator on plant spring phenology in the following year. Growing studies have highlighted the need to include a chilling factor in thermal‐time phenology models. To date, the effect of chilling on vegetation green‐up date (VGD) has seldom been explored...

CONTEXT Modelling approaches have already been used to quantitatively assess the trade-offs between crop yield and N2O emissions as impacted by management practices. However, the model's performance in terms of predicting N2O emissions was mainly assessed against total emissions per growing season or year, which may reduce accuracy in modelling due...

Organic amendment (OA) additions may profoundly regulate the turnover behaviours of soil organic carbon (SOC). Explicit understanding of such role of OA is crucial for accurately assessing the potential of carbon sequestration in agricultural soils. To explore the effects of OA additions on the detailed SOC stabilization and destabilization process...

Atmospheric methane (CH4) is a potent greenhouse gas that is strongly influenced by several human activities. China, as one of the major agricultural and energy production countries, contributes considerably to the global anthropogenic CH4 emissions by rice cultivation, ruminant feeding, and coal production. Understanding the characteristics of Chi...

Grassland aboveground biomass (AGB) is a critical component of the global carbon cycle and reflects ecosystem productivity. Although it is widely acknowledged that dynamics of grassland biomass is significantly regulated by climate change, in situ evidence at meaningfully large spatiotemporal scales is limited. Here, we combine biomass measurements...

In September 2020, President Xi Jinping announced that China strives to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. This ambitious and bold commitment was well received by the global community. However, the technology and pathway are not so clear. Here, we conducted an extensive review covering more than 200 published papers and summarized the key techn...

Background: Quantifying CO2 emissions from cities is of great importance because cities contribute more than 70% of the global total CO2 emissions. As the largest urbanized megalopolis region in northern China, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (Jing-Jin-Ji, JJJ) region (population: 112.7 million) is under considerable pressure to reduce carbon emissions....

Grassland aboveground biomass (AGB) is a critical component of the global carbon cycle and reflects ecosystem productivity. Although it is widely acknowledged that dynamics of grassland biomass are significantly regulated by climate change, in situ evidence at large spatiotemporal scales is limited. Here, we combine biomass measurements from six lo...

The fate of soil organic carbon (SOC) under warming is poorly understood, particularly across large extents and in the whole-soil profile. Using a data-model integration approach applied across the globe, we find that downward movement of SOC along the soil profile reduces SOC loss under warming. We predict that global SOC stocks (down to 2 m) will...

Wetlands are the largest and most uncertain natural sources of atmospheric methane (CH4). Several process-based models have been developed to quantify the magnitude and estimate spatial and temporal variations in CH4 emissions from global wetlands. Reliable models are required to estimate global wetland CH4 emissions. This study aimed to test two p...

Plant root-derived carbon (C) inputs (I root ) are the primary source of C in mineral bulk soil. However, a fraction of I root may lose directly (I loss , e.g., via rhizosphere microbial respiration, leaching and fauna feeding) without contributing to bulk soil C pool. This loss has never been quantified, particularly at global scale, inhibiting re...

The depth distribution of belowground net primary production (BNPP) has been unquantified globally, hindering our understanding of belowground carbon dynamics. We synthesize global observational data sets to infer the depth allocation of BNPP down to 2 m, and map depth-specific BNPP globally at 1 km resolution. We estimate that global average BNPP...

The depth distribution of belowground net primary production (BNPP) has been unquantified globally, hindering our understanding of belowground carbon dynamics. We synthesize global observational data sets to infer the depth allocation of BNPP down to 2 m, and map depth-specific BNPP globally at 1 km resolution. We estimate that global average BNPP...

Atmospheric methane (CH4) is a potent greenhouse gas that is strongly influenced by several human activities. China, as one of the major agricultural and energy production countries, e.g., rice cultivation, ruminant feeding and coal production, contributes considerably to the global anthropogenic CH4 emissions. Understanding the characteristics of...

Process-based models have been widely used to simulate the CH4 budget in natural wetlands, but there are still large uncertainties in the simulation processes. Accuracy analysis of process-based models is important to evaluate the reliability of model estimates for different wetlands. In this study, we analyzed the three sources of the model bias f...

Reliable models are required to estimate global wetland CH4 emissions. This study aimed to test two process-based models, CH4MODwetland and TEM, against the CH4 flux measurements of marsh, swamps, peatland and coastal wetland sites across the world; specifically, model accuracy and generality were evaluated for different wetland types and in differ...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) in the subsoil below 0.3 m accounts for the majority of total SOC and may be as sensitive to climate change as topsoil SOC. Here we map global SOC turnover times (τ) in the subsoil layer at 1 km resolution using observational databases. Global mean τ is estimated to be [Formula: see text] yr (mean with 95% confidence inter...

Plain Language Summary The start and end of the plant growing season are changing in response to global warming, which has been widely reported by existing literatures using mainly Earth system modeling and remote sensing approaches. There is less direct evidence from the ground observations to demonstrate the effect of climate warming on the chang...

The Tibetan Plateau is an important component of the global carbon cycle due to the large permafrost carbon pool and its vulnerability to climate warming. The Tibetan Plateau has experienced a noticeable warming over the past few decades and is projected to continue warming in the future. However, the direction and magnitude of carbon fluxes respon...

Global warming is widely believed to extend the length of plant growing season (LOS)through advancing the start (SOS)and delaying the end (EOS)of plant growing season. However, divergent directions of phenological changes under current climate warming have been frequently reported but poorly understood. Here we collate the long-term filed phenologi...

The Tibetan Plateau is an important component of the global carbon cycle due to the large permafrost carbon pool and its vulnerability to climate warming. The Tibetan Plateau has experienced a noticeable warming over the past few decades and is projected to continue warming in the future. However, the direction and magnitude of carbon fluxes respon...

In spite of the importance of N management in agricultural production, closing the full nitrogen balance remains a challenge, mainly due to the uncertainties in both fluxes of nitrogen input and output. We analyzed N deposition and its influence on crop productivity and field nitrogen balance based on data from three of 15 years (1990–2005) of expe...

To investigate the spatial representativeness of mixing layer height (MLH) observations in the North China Plain (NCP), we performed several successive MLH measurements with ceilometers from 2013 to 2017, and the MLH observation data were analyzed at different measurement scales. Daytime MLH differences among stations increased with increasing obse...

Agroecosystems face double pressures of producing more food to feed growing global population and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to mitigate climate change. The Huang-Huai-Hai (HHH) plain produces ∼1/3 wheat and maize of China with very high resource inputs, particularly synthetic nitrogen (N) fertilizers since the 1980 s. Although fertili...

A well-established and pre-calibrated crop model can normally represent the overall characteristics of crop growth and yield. However, it can hardly include all relevant factors that affect the yield, and usually overestimates the crop yield when extreme weather conditions occur. In this study, the authors first introduced a drought index (the Stan...

Changes in the soil organic carbon (SOC) stock are determined by the balance between the carbon input from organic materials and the output from the decomposition of soil C. The fate of SOC in cropland soils plays a significant role in both sustainable agricultural production and climate change mitigation. The spatiotemporal changes of soil organic...

As the Earth's third pole, the Tibetan Plateau ecosystems are extremely sensitive to climate change. However, the interannual climate sensitivity of the carbon balance of the Tibetan Plateau alpine grassland has not been well quantified under changes in the climate and atmospheric CO2 concentration. Here, we used a process-based biogeochemistry mod...

Abstract

Climate change continually affects our capabilities to feed the increasing population. Rising temperatures have the potential to shorten the crop growth duration and therefore reduce crop yields. In the past decades, China has successfully improved crop cultivars to stabilize, and even lengthen, the crop growth duration to make use of increasing he...

Reliable national estimates of CH4 emissions from natural wetlands depend on model validation based on site observations. We therefore evaluated the performance of the CH4MODwetland model in simulating CH4 emissions from 11 representative wetland sites in five regions of China. Model performance analysis showed that this method effectively simulate...

Concentrations of atmospheric nitrous oxide (N2O), a potent greenhouse gas, have been continuously increasing, and cropland soils are one of the largest sources of N2O. Variations in environmental and anthropogenic factors have substantial impacts on both the frequency and magnitude of N2O emissions. Based on measurements from a wheat–maize system...

The Sanjiang Plain has been experienced significant wetland loss due to expanded agricultural activities, and will be potentially restored by the China National Wetland Conservation Action Plan (NWCP) in future. The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of future climate warming and wetland restoration on wetland CH4 emissions in northe...

Scientific Reports 6: Article number: 27199; 10.1038/srep27199Published online: June022016; Updated: July082016 In the original version of this Article, Yao Huang was incorrectly affiliated with ‘University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China’. The correct affiliation is listed below. State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Envir...

The natural wetlands of the Tibetan Plateau (TP) are considered to be an important natural source of methane (CH4) to the atmosphere. The long-term variation in CH4 associated with climate change and wetland loss is still largely unknown. From 1950 to 2010, CH4 emissions over the TP were analyzed using a model framework that integrates CH4MODwetlan...

Coastal wetlands are important CH4 sources to the atmosphere. Coastal wetlands account for ~10% of the total area of natural wetlands in China, but the size of this potential CH4 source remains highly uncertain. We introduced the influence of salinity on CH4 production and CH4 diffusion into a biogeophysical model named CH4MODwetland so that it can...

Cropland soil organic carbon (SOC) is undergoing substantial alterations due to both environmental and anthropogenic changes. Although numerous case studies have been conducted, there remains a lack of quantification of the consequences of such environmental and anthropogenic changes on the SOC sequestration across global agricultural systems. Here...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) dynamics in croplands is a crucial component of global carbon (C) cycle. Depending on local environmental conditions and management practices, typical C input is generally required to reduce or reverse C loss in agricultural soils. No studies have quantified the critical C input for maintaining SOC at global scale with hig...

Natural wetlands are among the most important sources of atmospheric methane and thus important for better understanding the long-term temporal variations in the atmospheric methane concentration. During the last 60 years, wetlands have experienced extensive conversion and impacts from climate warming which might result in complicated temporal and...

Background and aims: Increasing the soil organic carbon (SOC) pool in croplands can not only promote crop production but also mitigate climate change. The objective of this work was to quantify the needed C input rates for both maintaining China’s cropland SOC and improving it to global average level. Methods: By using a biogeophysical model (Agro-...