Winkler, A.; Sierra, C.: Towards a new generation of impulse‐response functions for integrated earth system understanding and climate change attribution. Geophysical Research Letters 52 (8), e2024GL112295 (2025)
Ruiz-Erazo, C. E.; Riascos-Acosta, R. I.; Guerrero-Martínez, E. S.; Marín-Vélez, A. M.; Sierra, C.; Ramírez-Correa, J. A.: Carbon sequestration potential in Retrophyllum rospigliosii (Pilg.) C. N. Page plantations for restoration purposes in the Colombian Andean region. Revista Chapingo Serie Ciencias Forestales y del Ambiente 91, e24009 (2025)
Chanca, I.; Levin, I.; Trumbore, S. E.; Macario, K.; Lavrič, J. V.; Quesada, C. A.; de Araújo, A. C.; Dias Júnior, C. Q.; van Asperen, H.; Hammer, S.et al.; Sierra, C.: How long does carbon stay in a near-pristine central Amazon forest? An empirical estimate with radiocarbon. Biogeosciences 22 (2), 472, S. 455 (2025)
Tangarife-Escobar, A.; Guggenberger, G.; Feng, X.; Munoz, E.; Chanca, I.; Peichl, M.; Smith, P.; Sierra, C.: Radiocarbon isotopic disequilibrium shows little incorporation of new carbon in mineral soils of a boreal forest ecosystem. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences 129 (9), e2024JG008191 (2024)
von Fromm, S. F.; Hoyt, A. M.; Sierra, C.; Georgiou, K.; Doetterl, S.; Trumbore, S. E.: Controls and relationships of soil organic carbon abundance and persistence vary across pedo-climatic regions. Global Change Biology 30 (5), e17320 (2024)
Ramirez, J. A.; Craven, D.; Herrera-Ramirez, D.; Posada, J. M.; Reu, B.; Sierra, C. A.; Hoch, G.; Handa, I. T.; Messier, C.: Non-structural carbohydrate concentrations in tree organs vary across biomes and leaf habits, but are independent of the fast-slow plant economic spectrum. Frontiers in Plant Science 15, 1375958 (2024)
Muñoz, E.; Chanca, I.; González-Sosa, M.; Sarquis, A.; Tangarife-Escobar, A.; Sierra, C.: On the importance of time in carbon sequestration in soils and climate change mitigation. Global Change Biology 30 (3), e17229 (2024)
Tangarife-Escobar, A.; Guggenberger, G.; Feng, X.; Dai, G.; Urbina-Malo, C.; Azizi-Rad, M.; Sierra, C. A.: Moisture and temperature effects on the radiocarbon signature of respired carbon dioxide to assess stability of soil carbon in the Tibetan Plateau. Biogeosciences 21 (5), S. 1277 - 1299 (2024)
Estupinan-Suarez, L. M.; Mahecha, M. D.; Brenning, A.; Kraemer, G.; Poveda, G.; Reichstein, M.; Sierra, C.: Spatial patterns of vegetation activity related to ENSO in Northern South America. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences 129 (1), e2022JG007344 (2024)
Sierra, C.; Ahrens, B.; Bolinder, M. A.; Braakhekke, M. C.; von Fromm, S. F.; Kätterer, T.; Luo, Z.; Parvin, N.; Wang, G.: Carbon sequestration in the subsoil and the time required to stabilize carbon for climate change mitigation. Global Change Biology 30 (1), e17153 (2024)
Munoz, E.; Chanca, I.; Sierra, C.: Increased atmospheric CO2 and the transit time of carbon in terrestrial ecosystems. Global Change Biology 29 (23), S. 6441 - 6452 (2023)
Eglinton, T. I.; Graven, H. D.; Raymond, P. A.; Trumbore, S. E.; Aluwihare, L.; Bard, E.; Basu, S.; Friedlingstein, P.; Hammer, S.; Lester, J.et al.; Sanderman, J.; Schuur, E. A. G.; Sierra, C. A.; Synal, H.-A.; Turnbull, J. C.; Wacker, L.: Making the case for an International Decade of Radiocarbon. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London - Series A: Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences 381 (2261), 20230081 (2023)
Munoz, E.; Sierra, C. A.: Deterministic and stochastic components of atmospheric CO2 inside forest canopies and consequences for predicting carbon and water exchange. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 341, 109624 (2023)
Stoner, S.; Trumbore, S. E.; González-Pérez, J. A.; Schrumpf, M.; Sierra, C. A.; Hoyt, A. M.; Chadwick, O.; Doetterl, S.: Relating mineral–organic matter stabilization mechanisms to carbon quality and age distributions using ramped thermal analysis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London - Series A: Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences 381 (2261), 20230139 (2023)
Stoner, S.; Schrumpf, M.; Hoyt, A. M.; Sierra, C. A.; Doetterl, S.; Galy, V.; Trumbore, S. E.: How well does ramped thermal oxidation quantify the age distribution of soil carbon? Assessing thermal stability of physically and chemically fractionated soil organic matter. Biogeosciences 20 (15), S. 3151 - 3163 (2023)
David Hafezi Rachti wurde gleich zweimal ausgezeichnet: für sein EGU-Poster mit dem diesjährigen „Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation“ (OSPP) und für seine Bachelorarbeit erhielt er den ersten Preis des „Young Climate Scientist Award 2024“.
Microorganisms in aquifers deep below the earth’s surface produce similar amounts of biomass as those in some marine waters. This is the finding of researchers led by the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv). The study has been published in Nature Geoscience.
You can't see them with the naked eye, but our forest ground is littered with microorganisms. They decompose falling leaves, thereby improving soil quality and counteracting climate change. But how do these single-celled organisms coordinate their tasks? An international research team has been looking into this little-understood process. The results of the study were recently published in Scientific Reports.
International researchers found a pattern of extreme climate conditions leading to forest dieback. To do this, the team had collected worldwide records of climate-related tree and forest dieback events over the past nearly five decades. The results, recently published in Nature Communications, reveal an ominous scenario for forests in the context of ongoing global warming.
International forest experts analyzed major tree and forest dieback events that occurred globally in the last decades in response to climate extremes. To their surprise many forests were strongly affected that were not considered threatened based on current scientific understanding. The study, led by the MPI-BGC and published in Annual Reviews in Plant Biology, underscores also that further tree and forest dieback is likely to occur.
Precisely how does a forest system and the individual plants within it react to extreme drought? Understanding the processes involved is crucial to making forests more resilient in the increasingly dry climate that will result from climate change, and also important for refining climate models. A research team led by Prof. Dr. Christiane Werner from the University of Freiburg has conducted the most extensive experiment to date into this subject using stable isotopes to trace flows of water and carbon through a forest.
The efficiency of plants to use water and take up carbon dioxide for growth critically depends on the availability of nitrogen, phosphorus and their balance in the ecosystem. In a recent study, researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry and their Spanish partners analyzed how plants and their environment respond to the addition of these nutrients.
The Global Carbon Project is a large international research project and part of the Future Earth initiative on global sustainability. It strives to develop a comprehensive picture of the global carbon cycle, making available up-to-date estimations of global CO2 emissions and sinks as well as information on the state of the climate system.
In April 2018 Susan Trumbore received the Benjamin Franklin Medal for her groundbreaking use of radiocarbon measurements in forests and soils to assess the carbon flux between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Her research thus makes an important contribution to understanding climate change.
The annual Global Carbon Budget for 2017 was recently published in the journal Earth System Science Data. As was the case in previous years, the Global Carbon Project was supported by MPI-BGC scientists Christian Rödenbeck and Sönke Zaehle.
The influence of prolonged climatic changes on the terrestrial ecosystems of our planet is generally known; however, how and to what extent short-term climate extremes can have a definite impact on ecosystems is barely described. The variables involved are too numerous, and observations and measurements in the field are usually too short term. In a…
According to a recent study in the scientific journal “Nature,” plants in terrestrial ecosystems store approximately 450 billion tons of carbon worldwide – less than half of the amount theoretically possible. This is due to the use of biomass by humans. Surprisingly, forestry and agriculture in natural forests and grasslands have a similarly…