Yiqi Luo

Northern Arizona University | NAU · Center for Ecosystem Science and Society

Diversified cropping systems offer a chance to mitigate environmental impacts of conventional agriculture, but effects on soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration and nitrogen (N) dynamics remain debated. We integrated a 20-year field experiment and laboratory measurements with three stable-isotope-enabled mechanistic models to examine SOC stocks an...

Enhancing terrestrial carbon (C) stock through ecological restoration, one of the prominent approaches for natural climate solutions, is conventionally considered to be achieved through an ecological pathway, i.e., increased plant C uptake. By conducting a comprehensive regional survey of 4279 1 × 1 m ² plots at 517 sites across China’s drylands an...

Global nitrogen (N) deposition substantially enhances ecosystem carbon cycling but usually results in minor carbon sequestration. The mechanisms underlying the minor stimulation of N deposition on carbon sequestration are not fully understood. Here, we used 22 sets of observations from a gradient N addition experiment with rates at 0, 2, 4, 8, 16,...

Microbial carbon use efficiency (CUE) affects the fate and storage of carbon in terrestrial ecosystems, but its global importance remains uncertain. Accurately modeling and predicting CUE on a global scale is challenging due to inconsistencies in measurement techniques and the complex interactions of climatic, edaphic, and biological factors across...

Here is a commentary on “Methane Fluxes in Tidal Marshes of the Contiguous United States” recently published in Global Change Biology . Tidal wetlands are distinctive ecosystems with highly diverse species composition and complex, flexible environments. Thus, it is critical to accurately determine CH 4 emissions from tidal wetlands in a changing cl...

Quantifying the current and future soil organic carbon (SOC) is fundamental to achieving China's carbon neutrality goals. However, considerable uncertainties and knowledge gaps remain regarding the changes of SOC under future climate change. Here, we compiled an unprecedented database for SOC sample sites in China around 2010. We first utilized var...

In their Letter‐to‐Editor, Liu & Chen (2024) raised the importance and suitability of our recent stoichiometric approach to assess the contribution of plant residue (litter) and microbial sources to mineral‐associated organic matter (MAOM). We highly appreciate their Letter as well as the further suggestion and comments and offer two points of clar...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) persistence is predominantly governed by mineral protection, consequently, soil mineral-associated (MAOC) and particulate organic carbon (POC) turnovers have different impacts on the vulnerability of SOC to climate change. Here, we generate the global MAOC and POC maps using 8341 observations and then infer the turnover ti...

Growing evidence indicates that plant community structure and traits have changed under climate warming, especially in cold or high-elevation regions. However, the impact of these warming-induced changes on ecosystem carbon sequestration remains unclear. Using a warming experiment on the high-elevation Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, we found that warming...

Global soil nitrogen (N) cycling remains poorly understood due to its complex driving mechanisms. Here, we present a comprehensive analysis of global soil δ ¹⁵ N, a stable isotopic signature indicative of the N input–output balance, using a machine‐learning approach on 10,676 observations from 2670 sites. Our findings reveal prevalent joint effects...

Land use change (LUC) alters the global carbon (C) stock, but our estimation of the alteration remains uncertain and is a major impediment to predicting the global C cycle. The uncertainty is partly due to the limited number and geographical bias of observations, and limited exploration of its predictors. Here we generated a comprehensive global da...

Current biogeochemical models produce carbon–climate feedback projections with large uncertainties, often attributed to their structural differences when simulating soil organic carbon (SOC) dynamics worldwide. However, choices of model parameter values that quantify the strength and represent properties of different soil carbon cycle processes cou...

Global estimates of the size, distribution, and vulnerability of soil inorganic carbon (SIC) remain largely unquantified. By compiling 223,593 field-based measurements and developing machine-learning models, we report that global soils store 2305 ± 636 (±1 SD) billion tonnes of carbon as SIC over the top 2-meter depth. Under future scenarios, soil...

Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of short-term (~1 y) drought events—the most common duration of drought—globally. Yet the impact of this intensification of drought on ecosystem functioning remains poorly resolved. This is due in part to the widely disparate approaches ecologists have employed to study drought, variation in t...

The impact of more extreme climate conditions under global warming on soil organic carbon (SOC) dynamics remains unquantified. Here we estimate the response of SOC to climate extreme shifts under 1.5 °C warming by combining a space-for-time substitution approach and global SOC measurements (0–30 cm soil). Most extremes (22 out of 33 assessed extrem...

Mineral-associated soil organic matter (MAOM) is the largest, slowest-cycling pool of carbon (C) in the terrestrial biosphere. MAOM is primarily derived from plant and microbial sources, yet the relative contributions of these two sources to MAOM remain unresolved. Resolving this issue is essential for managing and modeling soil carbon responses to...

The current generation of biogeochemical models produce large uncertainty in carbon-climate feedback projections. Structural differences in these models have been identified as a major source of inter-model uncertainties when simulating soil organic carbon (SOC) dynamics worldwide. However, parameterization could also play a role, particularly when...

Because of global warming, Earth’s ecosystems have been experiencing more frequent and severe heatwaves. Heatwaves are expected to tip terrestrial carbon sequestration by elevating ecosystem respiration and suppressing gross primary productivity (GPP). Here, using the convergent cross-mapping technique, this study detected positive bidirectional ca...

Anthropogenic nitrogen (N) loading alters soil ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) and bacteria (AOB) abundances, likely leading to substantial changes in soil nitrification. However, the factors and mechanisms determining the responses of soil AOA:AOB and nitrification to N loading are still unclear, making it difficult to predict future changes in so...

In their commentary, Xiao et al. cautioned that the conclusions on the critical role of microbial carbon use efficiency (CUE) in global soil organic carbon (SOC) storage in a paper by Tao et al. (2023) might be too simplistic. They claimed that Tao et al.’s study lacked mechanistic consideration of SOC formation and excluded important datasets. Xia...

Potassium (K⁺) is the most abundant inorganic cation in plant cells, playing a critical role in various plant functions. However, the impacts of K on natural terrestrial ecosystems have been less studied compared with nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P). Here, we present a global meta‐analysis aimed at quantifying the response of aboveground production...

Grassland and other herbaceous communities cover significant portions of Earth's terrestrial surface and provide many critical services, such as carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, and food production. Forecasts of global change impacts on these services will require predictive tools, such as process‐based dynamic vegetation models. Yet, model...

The drivers of interannual variability (IAV) of net ecosystem exchange (NEE) in forested wetlands are poorly understood, making it difficult to predict changes in atmospheric fluxes in response to land use and climate change. Similarly, these ecosystems demonstrate dynamic physiological and phenological responses to climate over time yet are typica...

In the accompanying Comment, He et al. argue that the determinant role of microbial carbon use efficiency in global soil organic carbon (SOC) storage shown in Tao et al. (2023) was overestimated because carbon inputs were neglected in our data analysis while they suggest that our model-based analysis could be biased and model-dependent. Their argum...

Numerical models have been developed to investigate and understand responses of biogeochemical cycle to global changes. Steady state, when a system is in dynamic equilibrium, is generally required to initialize these model simulations. However, the spin‐up process that is used to achieve steady state pose a great burden to computational resources,...

Ecosystem respiration (ER) is among the largest carbon fluxes between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Understanding the temperature response of ER is crucial for predicting the climate change-carbon cycle feedback. However, whether there is an apparent optimum temperature of ER ([Formula: see text]) and how it changes with temperature remain poor...

Extensive ecological research has investigated extreme climate events or long-term changes in average climate variables, but changes in year-to-year (interannual) variability may also cause important biological responses, even if the mean climate is stable. The environmental stochasticity that is a hallmark of climate variability can trigger unexpe...

Future global changes will impact carbon (C) fluxes and pools in most terrestrial ecosystems and the feedback of terrestrial carbon cycling to atmospheric CO2. Determining the vulnerability of C in ecosystems to future environmental change is thus vital for targeted land management and policy. The C capacity of an ecosystem is a function of its C i...

Climate change leads to increasing temperature and more extreme hot and drought events. Ecosystem capability to cope with climate warming depends on vegetation's adjusting pace with temperature change. How environmental stresses impair such a vegetation pace has not been carefully investigated. Here we show that dryness substantially dampens vegeta...

Aim Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are widely distributed soil organisms that play critical roles in ecosystem functions. However, little is known about their global distribution and the underlying mechanisms. Here, we aimed to explore distribution pattern and key predictors of AMF diversity and abundance at the global scale. Location Global....

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...

Soils store more carbon than other terrestrial ecosystems1,2. How soil organic carbon (SOC) forms and persists remains uncertain1,3, which makes it challenging to understand how it will respond to climatic change3,4. It has been suggested that soil microorganisms play an important role in SOC formation, preservation and loss5–7. Although microorgan...

Abstract Significant land greening since the 1980s has been detected through satellite observation, forest inventory, and Earth system modeling. However, whether and to what extent global land greening enhances ecosystem carbon stock remains uncertain. Here, using 40 global models, we first detected a positive correlation between the terrestrial ec...

Extreme climate events, such as severe droughts and heavy rainfall, have profound impacts on the sustainable provision of ecosystem functions and services. However, how N enrichment interacts with discrete extreme climate events to affect ecosystem functions is largely unknown. Here, we investigated the responses of the temporal stability (i.e., re...

Peatlands contain one-third of global soil carbon (C), but the responses of peatland ecosystems to long-term warming are not well understood. Here, we pursue an emergent understanding of warming effects on ecosystem C fluxes at peatlands by constraining a process-oriented model, the Terrestrial ECOsystem (TECO) model, with observation data from a l...

Rising atmospheric CO2 concentration triggers an emergent phenomenon called plant photosynthetic acclimation to elevated CO2 (PAC). PAC is often characterized by a reduction in leaf photosynthetic capacity (Asat ), which varies dramatically along the continuum of plant phylogeny. However, it remains unclear whether the mechanisms responsible for PA...

Nitrogen (N) limitation greatly constrains terrestrial ecosystem carbon (C) uptake and its response to climate change and elevated carbon dioxide. Hence, accurate assessments of ecosystem N limitation are crucial for predicting C-N feedbacks, and vital for providing guidance for policy making or ecosystem management as well. This study aims to retr...

Large across-model spread in simulating land carbon (C) dynamics has been ubiquitously demonstrated in model intercomparison projects (MIPs), and became a major impediment in advancing climate change prediction. Thus, it is imperative to identify underlying sources of the spread. Here we used a novel matrix approach to analytically pin down the sou...

Phosphorus is an essential element for plant metabolism and growth, but its future supply under elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 remains uncertain. Here we present measurements of phosphorus concentration from two long-term (15 and 9 years) rice free air carbon dioxide enrichment experiments. Although no changes were observed in the initial year...

Carbon-nitrogen coupling is a fundamental principle in ecosystem ecology. However, how the coupling responds to global change has not yet been examined. Through a comprehensive and systematic literature review, we assessed how the dynamics of carbon processes change with increasing nitrogen input and how nitrogen processes change with increasing ca...

Natural revegetation has been reported to play a very active role in ecosystem carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) sinks in degenerated ecosystems. However, the responses of C and N sequestration and stabilization in soil organic matter (SOM) to natural revegetation remain inadequately understood. In this study, we analyzed C and N contents and δ¹³C and δ¹...

Soil represents the largest terrestrial carbon pool, and it liberates massive amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere via respiration, which can influence global carbon cycle. In recent decades, anthropogenic activities have dramatically increased the rates of atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition worldwide, but our current understanding of...

Plant secondary succession is a very effective approach for the rejuvenation of degraded ecosystems. In order to comprehend alterations and driving mechanisms of soil bacterial communities under secondary succession of old-field and reveal their subsequent impacts on the decomposition and accumulation of soil organic carbon (SOC) and nitrogen (SON)...

Laboratory incubation is a commonly used method to measure the decomposition of soil organic carbon (SOC). While incubation experiments are conducted across a wide range of durations that may vary from hours to years, no method is available to determine an optimal duration of the incubation experiment so that SOC decomposition can be best understoo...

Abstract Soil microbial community's responses to climate warming alter the global carbon cycle. In temperate ecosystems, soil microbial communities function along seasonal cycles. However, little is known about how the responses of soil microbial communities to warming vary when the season changes. In this study, we investigated the seasonal dynami...

Respiratory effluxes of carbon (C) from the soil to the atmosphere are expected to rise with temperature, potentially intensifying future climate warming. However, whether and how this increase would be sustained under long-term warming is not well understood. Here, we combined a manipulation experiment in an alpine meadow with a global meta-analysi...

Natural revegetation has been widely confirmed to be an effective strategy for the restoration of degraded lands, particularly in terms of rehabilitating ecosystem productivity and soil nutrients. Yet the mechanisms of how natural revegetation influences the variabilities and drivers of soil residing fungal communities, and its downstream effects o...

Future global changes will impact carbon (C) fluxes and pools in most terrestrial ecosystems and the feedback of terrestrial carbon cycling to atmospheric CO2. Determining the vulnerability of ecosystems to future changes in C is thus vital for targeted land management and policy. The C capacity of an ecosystem (XC) is a function of its C inputs (e...

The spatial and temporal variations in terrestrial carbon storage play a pivotal role in regulating future climate change. However, Earth system models (ESMs), which have coupled the terrestrial biosphere and atmosphere, show great uncertainty in simulating the global land carbon storage. Here, based on multiple global datasets and a traceability a...

Temperature response of gross primary productivity (GPP) is a well-known property of ecosystem, but GPP at the optimum temperature (GPP_Topt) has not been fully discussed. Our understanding of how GPP_Topt responds to warming and water availability is highly limited. In this study, we analyzed data at 326 globally distributed eddy covariance sites...

Lignin decomposition is critically linked to terrestrial carbon (C) cycle due to the enormous C mass of lignin and its importance in controlling initial rates of litter decomposition. Interactions between lignin and iron (Fe) minerals have been increasingly recognized as key mediators of lignin decomposition in experimental studies. However, we sti...

The terrestrial carbon (C) cycle is shifting to a state of dynamic disequilibrium under a rapid global climate change. However, the magnitude of such disequilibrium is inherently hard to measure directly. Abundant studies have revealed that the availability of nutrients, particularly nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), constrains ecosystem productivit...

Natural restoration of vegetation has been widely implemented as an effective strategy for recovery of degraded ecosystems. However, how soil microbial communities vary with natural restoration of vegetation and associated drivers remains unclear. Here, we investigated the changes in soil microbial communities at 0–60 cm soil depths along ~160 year...

Aim Fresh carbon (C) inputs to the soil can have important consequences for the decomposition rates of soil organic matter (priming effect), thereby impacting the delicate global C balance at the soil–atmosphere interface. Yet, the environmental factors that control soil priming effect intensity remain poorly understood at a global scale. Location...

Understanding the dynamics of peatland methane (CH4) emissions and quantifying sources of uncertainty in estimating peatland CH4 emissions are critical for mitigating climate change. The relative contributions of CH4 emission pathways through ebullition, plant-mediated transport, and diffusion, together with their different transport rates and vuln...