Climate change and the permafrost carbon feedback.

Large quantities of organic carbon are stored in frozen soils (permafrost) within Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. A warming climate can induce environmental changes that accelerate the microbial breakdown of organic carbon and the release of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane. This feedback can accelerate climate change, but the magnitude and timing of greenhouse gas emission from these regions and their impact on climate change remain uncertain. Here we find that current evidence suggests a gradual and prolonged release of greenhouse gas emissions in a warming climate and present a research strategy with which to target poorly understood aspects of permafrost carbon dynamics.

Tundra ecosystems observed to be CO2 sources due to differential amplification of the carbon cycle.

Are tundra ecosystems currently a carbon source or sink? What is the future trajectory of tundra carbon fluxes in response to climate change? These questions are of global importance because of the vast quantities of organic carbon stored in permafrost soils. In this meta-analysis, we compile 40 years of CO2 flux observations from 54 studies spanning 32 sites across northern high latitudes. Using time-series analysis, we investigated if seasonal or annual CO2 fluxes have changed over time, and whether spatial differences in mean annual temperature could help explain temporal changes in CO2 flux. Growing season net CO2 uptake has definitely increased since the 1990s; the data also suggest (albeit less definitively) an increase in winter CO2 emissions, especially in the last decade. In spite of the uncertainty in the winter trend, we estimate that tundra sites were annual CO2 sources from the mid-1980s until the 2000s, and data from the last 7 years show that tundra continue to emit CO2 annually. CO2 emissions exceed CO2 uptake across the range of temperatures that occur in the tundra biome. Taken together, these data suggest that despite increases in growing season uptake, tundra ecosystems are currently CO2 sources on an annual basis.

Fungal diversity in permafrost and tallgrass prairie soils under experimental warming conditions.

Soil fungi play a major role in terrestrial ecosystem functioning through interactions with soil structure, plants, micro- and mesofauna, and nutrient cycling through predation, pathogenesis, mutualistic, and saprotrophic roles. The diversity of soil fungi was assessed by sequencing their 28S rRNA gene in Alaskan permafrost and Oklahoma tallgrass prairie soils at experimental sites where the effect of climate warming is under investigation. A total of 226,695 reads were classified into 1,063 genera, covering 62% of the reference data set. Using the Bayesian Classifier offered by the Ribosomal Database Project (RDP) with 50% bootstrapping classification confidence, approximately 70% of sequences were returned as "unclassified" at the genus level, although the majority (∼65%) were classified at the class level, which provided insight into these lesser-known fungal lineages. Those unclassified at the genus level were subjected to BLAST analysis against the ARB-SILVA database, where ∼50% most closely matched nonfungal taxa. Compared to the more abundant sequences, a higher proportion of rare operational taxonomic units (OTU) were successfully classified to genera at 50% bootstrap confidence, indicating that the fungal rare biosphere in these sites is not composed of sequencing artifacts. There was no significant effect after 1 year of warming on the fungal community structure at both sites, except perhaps for a few minor members, but there was a significant effect of sample depth in the permafrost soils. Despite overall significant community structure differences driven by variations in OTU dominance, the prairie and permafrost soils shared 90% and 63% of all fungal sequences, respectively, indicating a fungal "seed bank" common between both sites.

Circumpolar distribution and carbon storage of thermokarst landscapes.

Thermokarst is the process whereby the thawing of ice-rich permafrost ground causes land subsidence, resulting in development of distinctive landforms. Accelerated thermokarst due to climate change will damage infrastructure, but also impact hydrology, ecology and biogeochemistry. Here, we present a circumpolar assessment of the distribution of thermokarst landscapes, defined as landscapes comprised of current thermokarst landforms and areas susceptible to future thermokarst development. At 3.6 × 106 km2, thermokarst landscapes are estimated to cover ∼20% of the northern permafrost region, with approximately equal contributions from three landscape types where characteristic wetland, lake and hillslope thermokarst landforms occur. We estimate that approximately half of the below-ground organic carbon within the study region is stored in thermokarst landscapes. Our results highlight the importance of explicitly considering thermokarst when assessing impacts of climate change, including future landscape greenhouse gas emissions, and provide a means for assessing such impacts at the circumpolar scale.

Denitrifying and diazotrophic community responses to artificial warming in permafrost and tallgrass prairie soils.

Increasing temperatures have been shown to impact soil biogeochemical processes, although the corresponding changes to the underlying microbial functional communities are not well understood. Alterations in the nitrogen (N) cycling functional component are particularly important as N availability can affect microbial decomposition rates of soil organic matter and influence plant productivity. To assess changes in the microbial component responsible for these changes, the composition of the N-fixing (nifH), and denitrifying (nirS, nirK, nosZ) soil microbial communities was assessed by targeted pyrosequencing of functional genes involved in N cycling in two major biomes where the experimental effect of climate warming is under investigation, a tallgrass prairie in Oklahoma (OK) and the active layer above permafrost in Alaska (AK). Raw reads were processed for quality, translated with frameshift correction, and a total of 313,842 amino acid sequences were clustered and linked to a nearest neighbor using reference datasets. The number of OTUs recovered ranged from 231 (NifH) to 862 (NirK). The N functional microbial communities of the prairie, which had experienced a decade of experimental warming were the most affected with changes in the richness and/or overall structure of NifH, NirS, NirK and NosZ. In contrast, the AK permafrost communities, which had experienced only 1 year of warming, showed decreased richness and a structural change only with the nirK-harboring bacterial community. A highly divergent nirK-harboring bacterial community was identified in the permafrost soils, suggesting much novelty, while other N functional communities exhibited similar relatedness to the reference databases, regardless of site. Prairie and permafrost soils also harbored highly divergent communities due mostly to differing major populations.

A simplified, data-constrained approach to estimate the permafrost carbon-climate feedback.

We present an approach to estimate the feedback from large-scale thawing of permafrost soils using a simplified, data-constrained model that combines three elements: soil carbon (C) maps and profiles to identify the distribution and type of C in permafrost soils; incubation experiments to quantify the rates of C lost after thaw; and models of soil thermal dynamics in response to climate warming. We call the approach the Permafrost Carbon Network Incubation-Panarctic Thermal scaling approach (PInc-PanTher). The approach assumes that C stocks do not decompose at all when frozen, but once thawed follow set decomposition trajectories as a function of soil temperature. The trajectories are determined according to a three-pool decomposition model fitted to incubation data using parameters specific to soil horizon types. We calculate litterfall C inputs required to maintain steady-state C balance for the current climate, and hold those inputs constant. Soil temperatures are taken from the soil thermal modules of ecosystem model simulations forced by a common set of future climate change anomalies under two warming scenarios over the period 2010 to 2100. Under a medium warming scenario (RCP4.5), the approach projects permafrost soil C losses of 12.2-33.4 Pg C; under a high warming scenario (RCP8.5), the approach projects C losses of 27.9-112.6 Pg C. Projected C losses are roughly linearly proportional to global temperature changes across the two scenarios. These results indicate a global sensitivity of frozen soil C to climate change (γ sensitivity) of -14 to -19 Pg C °C(-1) on a 100 year time scale. For CH4 emissions, our approach assumes a fixed saturated area and that increases in CH4 emissions are related to increased heterotrophic respiration in anoxic soil, yielding CH4 emission increases of 7% and 35% for the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios, respectively, which add an additional greenhouse gas forcing of approximately 10-18%. The simplified approach presented here neglects many important processes that may amplify or mitigate C release from permafrost soils, but serves as a data-constrained estimate on the forced, large-scale permafrost C response to warming.

The impact of boreal forest fire on climate warming.

We report measurements and analysis of a boreal forest fire, integrating the effects of greenhouse gases, aerosols, black carbon deposition on snow and sea ice, and postfire changes in surface albedo. The net effect of all agents was to increase radiative forcing during the first year (34 +/- 31 Watts per square meter of burned area), but to decrease radiative forcing when averaged over an 80-year fire cycle (-2.3 +/- 2.2 Watts per square meter) because multidecadal increases in surface albedo had a larger impact than fire-emitted greenhouse gases. This result implies that future increases in boreal fire may not accelerate climate warming.