Requirements for An International Radiocarbon Soils Database

Abstract

Up to now, Global Carbon Cycle Models (GCCM) have only represented the soil and biosphere in a very simplified way. For example, the High Resolution Biosphere Model (HRBM) (Esser 1987; Esser and Lautenschlager 1994) distinguishes five subreservoirs and determines the fluxes between them for selected area of a global grid. The models have not yet been sufficiently tested against global observations. Such testing is difficult because the observed variables are in turn dependent on the behavior of other geological carbon pools, e.g., the atmosphere and ocean.