Melissa Pastore

USDA Forest Service

Uncertainty about long‐term leaf‐level responses to atmospheric CO2 rise is a major knowledge gap that exists because of limited empirical data. Thus, it remains unclear how responses of leaf gas exchange to elevated CO2 vary among plant species and functional groups, or across different levels of nutrient supply, and whether they persist over time...

Significance The long-term effects of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), high rates of nitrogen deposition, and declining plant biodiversity on ecosystem carbon pools are uncertain and rarely assessed in concert yet represent key feedbacks to global climate change. In a 19-y study in an open-air grassland experiment, increasing planted spec...

Cold‐air pooling is a global phenomenon that frequently sustains low temperatures in sheltered, low‐lying depressions and valleys and drives other key environmental conditions, such as soil temperature, soil moisture, vapor pressure deficit, frost frequency, and winter dynamics. Local climate patterns in areas prone to cold‐air pooling are partly d...

Warmer winters with less snowfall are increasing the frequency of soil freeze–thaw cycles across temperate regions. Soil microbial responses to freeze–thaw cycles vary and some of this variation may be explained by microbial conditioning to prior winter conditions, yet such linkages remain largely unexplored. We investigated how differences in temp...

Cold-air pooling is an important topoclimatic process that creates temperature inversions with the coldest air at the lowest elevations. Incomplete understanding of sub-canopy spatiotemporal cold-air pooling dynamics and associated ecological impacts hinders predictions and conservation actions related to climate change and cold-dependent species a...

Long-term observations and experiments in diverse drylands reveal how ecosystems and services are responding to climate change. To develop generalities about climate change impacts at dryland sites, we compared broadscale patterns in climate and synthesized primary production responses among the eight terrestrial, nonforested sites of the United St...

Terrestrial ecosystems sequester carbon from the atmosphere through a single biological process – photosynthesis – and thus considerable research has centered on how global change factors influence aboveground plant dynamics. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Disentangling impacts of multiple global changes on terrestrial carbon cycling is important, both in its own right and because such impacts can dampen or accelerate increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Here we report on an eight-year grassland experiment, TeRaCON, in Minnesota, United States, that factorially manipulated four drivers: temper...

Global changes can interact to affect photosynthesis and thus ecosystem carbon capture, yet few multi‐factor field studies exist to examine such interactions. Here we evaluate leaf gas exchange responses of five perennial grassland species from four functional groups to individual and interactive global changes in an open‐air experiment in Minnesot...

Nie and colleagues suggest a key role for interannual climate variation as an explanation for the temporal dynamics of an unexpected 20-year reversal of biomass responses of C 3 -C 4 grasses to elevated CO 2 . However, we had already identified some climate-dependent differences in C 3 and C 4 responses to eCO 2 and shown that these could not fully...

Wolf and Ziska suggest that soil and species attributes can explain an unexpected 20-year reversal of C3-C4 grass responses to elevated CO2 This is consistent with our original interpretation; however, we disagree with the assertion that such explanations somehow render our results irrelevant for questioning a long-standing paradigm of plant respon...

A short-term trend reversed Theory and empirical data both support the paradigm that C 4 plant species (in which the first product of carbon fixation is a four-carbon molecule) benefit less from rising carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) concentrations than C 3 species (in which the first product is a three-carbon molecule). This is because their different phot...

Wetlands have an inordinate influence on the global greenhouse gas budget, but how global changes may alter wetland contribution to future greenhouse gas fluxes is poorly understood. We determined the greenhouse gas balance of a tidal marsh exposed to nine years of experimental carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen (N) manipulation. We estimated net ca...

Biogeochemical models that incorporate nitrogen (N) limitation indicate that N availability will control the magnitude of ecosystem carbon uptake in response to rising CO2 . Some models, however, suggest that elevated CO2 may promote ecosystem N accumulation, a feedback that in the long term could circumvent N limitation of the CO2 response while m...

Aims Leaf and root phenology play important roles controlling plant productivity and ecosystem function, yet, few studies link patterns of leaf and root phenology across woody species. Trees with diffuse-porous wood anatomy tend to leaf-out before ring-porous species and we expected that increases in transpiration with spring leaf-out would be coup...