Faster and tighter nitrogen cycling supports carbon capture under elevated carbon dioxide at BIFoR-FACE

Speaker: Sami Ullah

Venue: Meeting Room 123, College of Life Sciences, Zijingang Campus

Abstract: Land ecosystems including forests absorb ~25% of the total CO₂ emissions from anthropogenic sources. This sink is predicted to increase under increasing CO₂ concentration. However, carbon capture in forests is also controlled by nutrient availability including nitrogen and these interactions are poorly understood to support and validate when modelling the role of forests in climate change mitigation.

To elucidate the feedbacks between elevated CO₂, C capture and nutrient availability, the University of Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) established a Free-Air CO₂ Enrichment (FACE) facility exposing patches of temperate forests to +150 ppm CO₂ above the ambient since 2017. In this seminar, the carbon capture and nitrogen cycling responses to nine year of CO₂ enrichment will be highlighted to show the tight coupling of nitrogen cycling with carbon capture in mature temperate forests under future climates.