Affiliation:
1. Key Laboratory of Hydrometeorological Disaster Mechanism and Warning of Ministry of Water Resources (HYMED)/CIC‐FEMD Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology Nanjing China
2. School of Hydrology and Water Resources Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology Nanjing China
3. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Princeton University Princeton NJ USA
4. High Meadows Environmental Institute Princeton University Princeton NJ USA
Abstract
AbstractWhile it is well known that water availability controls vegetation growth and soil microbial activity, how aridity affects ecosystem carbon patterns is not completely understood. Toward a more quantitative assessment of terrestrial carbon stocks, here we apply dimensional analysis and scaling to the global joint distribution of terrestrial carbon stock, obtained from international survey data and harmonized global maps. The results show a remarkable self‐similar behavior of the global carbon stock with dryness index, whereby the key statistics (e.g., mean, quantiles, and standard deviation) of carbon stock tend to scale with the hydroclimatic regime (i.e., aridity) via a universal exponent. Such a scaling reflects the strong coupling between the hydrological cycle and biogeochemical process and enables robust predictions of carbon stocks as a function of aridity only. When normalized by its averages in the corresponding hydroclimatic regime, the carbon stock distributions collapse onto a single double Pareto lognormal distribution, often used in economics to describe income. The presence of this distribution in completely different physical contexts, such as biogeochemistry and economics, hints at generating mechanisms that transcend the details of the specific stock being considered.
Funder
Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology
Princeton University
Publisher
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Subject
General Earth and Planetary Sciences,Geophysics
Cited by
3 articles.
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