Quantifying spatially and temporally explicit CO 2 fertilization effects on global terrestrial ecosystem carbon dynamics
Abstract Current terrestrial ecosystem models are usually driven with global average annual atmospheric carbon dioxide ( CO 2 ) concentration data at the global scale. However, high‐precision CO 2 measurement from eddy flux towers showed that seasonal, spatial surface atmospheric CO 2 concentration differences were as large as 35 ppmv and the site‐level tests indicated that the CO 2 variation exhibited different effects on plant photosynthesis. Here we used a process‐based ecosystem model driven with two spatially and temporally explicit CO 2 data sets to analyze the atmospheric CO 2 fertilization effects on the global carbon dynamics of terrestrial ecosystems from 2003 to 2010. Our results demonstrated that CO 2 seasonal variation had a negative effect on plant carbon assimilation, while CO 2 spatial variation exhibited a positive impact. When both CO 2 seasonal and spatial effects were considered, global gross primary production and net ecosystem production were 1.7 Pg C·yr −1 and 0.08 Pg C·yr −1 higher than the simulation using uniformly distributed CO 2 data set and the difference was significant in tropical and temperate evergreen broadleaf forest regions. This study suggests that the CO 2 observation network should be expanded so that the realistic CO 2 variation can be incorporated into the land surface models to adequately account for CO 2 fertilization effects on global terrestrial ecosystem carbon dynamics.