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Soil is the largest terrestrial reservoir of organic carbon and is central for climate change mitigation and carbon-climate feedbacks. Chemical and physical associations of soil carbon with minerals play a critical role in carbon storage, but the amount and global capacity for storage in this form remain unquantified. Here, we produce spatially-resolved global estimates of mineral-associated organic carbon stocks and carbon-storage capacity by analyzing 1144 globally-distributed soil profiles. We show that current stocks total 899 Pg C to a depth of 1 m in non-permafrost mineral soils. Although this constitutes 66% and 70% of soil carbon in surface and deeper layers, respectively, it is only 42% and 21% of the mineralogical capacity. Regions under agricultural management and deeper soil layers show the largest undersaturation of mineral-associated carbon. Critically, the degree of undersaturation indicates sequestration efficiency over years to decades. We show that, across 103 carbon-accrual measurements spanning management interventions globally, soils furthest from their mineralogical capacity are more effective at accruing carbon; sequestration rates average 3-times higher in soils at one tenth of their capacity compared to soils at one half of their capacity. Our findings provide insights into the world’s soils, their capacity to store carbon, and priority regions and actions for soil carbon management. Mineral-organic associations play a key role in soil carbon preservation. Here, Georgiou et al. produce global estimates of mineral-associated soil carbon, providing insight into the world’s soils and their capacity to store carbon

Nutrients have been hypothesized to influence the distribution of the savanna biome through two possible mechanisms. Low nutrient availability may restrict growth rates of trees, thereby allowing for intermittent fires to maintain low tree cover; alternatively, nutrient deficiency may even place an absolute constraint on the ability of forests to form, independent of fire. However, we have little understanding of the scales at which nutrient limitation operates, what nutrients are limiting, and the mechanisms that influence how nutrient limitation regulates savanna–forest transitions. Here, I review literature, synthesize existing data, and present a simple calculation of nutrient demand to evaluate how nutrient limitation may regulate the distribution of the savanna biome. The literature primarily supports the hypothesis that nutrients may interact dynamically with fire to restrict the transition of savanna into forest. A compilation of indirect metrics of nutrient limitation suggest that nitrogen and phosphorus are both in short supply and may limit plants. Nutrient demand calculations provided a number of insights. First, trees required high rates of nitrogen and phosphorus supply relative to empirically determined inputs. Second, nutrient demand increased as landscapes approached the transition point between savanna and forest. Third, the potential for fire‐driven nutrient losses remained high throughout transitions, which may exaggerate limitation and could be a key feedback stabilizing the savanna biome. Fourth, nutrient limitation varied between functional groups, with fast‐growing forest species having substantially greater nutrient demand and a higher susceptibility to fire‐driven nutrient losses. Finally, African savanna trees required substantially larger amounts of nutrients supplied at greater rates, although this varied across plant functional groups. In summary, the ability of nutrients to control transitions emerges at individual and landscape scales, and is regulated through different mechanisms based on spatial (differences in underlying geology), temporal (stage in biome transition) and biological (species traits and community composition) variability.

Nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) limitation constrains the magnitude of terrestrial carbon uptake in response to elevated carbon dioxide and climate change. However, global maps of nutrient limitation are still lacking. Here we examined global N and P limitation using the ratio of site-averaged leaf N and P resorption efficiencies of the dominant species across 171 sites. We evaluated our predictions using a global database of N- and P-limitation experiments based on nutrient additions at 106 and 53 sites, respectively. Globally, we found a shift from relative P to N limitation for both higher latitudes and precipitation seasonality and lower mean annual temperature, temperature seasonality, mean annual precipitation and soil clay fraction. Excluding cropland, urban and glacial areas, we estimate that 18% of the natural terrestrial land area is significantly limited by N, whereas 43% is relatively P limited. The remaining 39% of the natural terrestrial land area could be co-limited by N and P or weakly limited by either nutrient alone. This work provides both a new framework for testing nutrient limitation and a benchmark of N and P limitation for models to constrain predictions of the terrestrial carbon sink.Spatial patterns in the phosphorus and nitrogen limitation in natural terrestrial ecosystems are reported from analysis of a global database of the resorption efficiency of nutrients by leaves.

Drought-induced tree mortality has been observed globally and is expected to increase under climate change scenarios, with large potential consequences for the terrestrial carbon sink. Predicting mortality across species is crucial for assessing the effects of climate extremes on forest community biodiversity, composition, and carbon sequestration. However, the physiological traits associated with elevated risk of mortality in diverse ecosystems remain unknown, although these traits could greatly improve understanding and prediction of tree mortality in forests. We performed a meta-analysis on species’ mortality rates across 475 species from 33 studies around the globe to assess which traits determine a species’ mortality risk. We found that species-specific mortality anomalies from community mortality rate in a given drought were associated with plant hydraulic traits. Across all species, mortality was best predicted by a low hydraulic safety margin—the difference between typical minimum xylem water potential and that causing xylem dysfunction—and xylem vulnerability to embolism. Angiosperms and gymnosperms experienced roughly equal mortality risks. Our results provide broad support for the hypothesis that hydraulic traits capture key mechanisms determining tree death and highlight that physiological traits can improve vegetation model prediction of tree mortality during climate extremes.

A meta-analysis and field data show that frequent fires in savannas and broadleaf forests decrease soil carbon and nitrogen over many decades; modelling shows that nitrogen loss drives carbon loss by reducing net primary productivity. Soil degradation fuelled by fire The patterns of naturally occurring fires have been altered, both spatially and temporally, as a result of climate and land-use changes. The long-term effects of fire frequency on soil carbon and nutrient storage and the resulting potential limitations on plant productivity remain poorly understood. On the basis of a meta-analysis and an independent dataset of additional field sites, this paper finds that frequent burning leads to soil carbon and nitrogen losses that emerge over decadal timescales. Furthermore, the authors use a model to suggest that the decadal losses of soil nitrogen as a result of more frequent burning could decrease the amount of carbon sequestered by net primary productivity. Fire frequency is changing globally and is projected to affect the global carbon cycle and climate 1 , 2 , 3 . However, uncertainty about how ecosystems respond to decadal changes in fire frequency makes it difficult to predict the effects of altered fire regimes on the carbon cycle; for instance, we do not fully understand the long-term effects of fire on soil carbon and nutrient storage, or whether fire-driven nutrient losses limit plant productivity 4 , 5 . Here we analyse data from 48 sites in savanna grasslands, broadleaf forests and needleleaf forests spanning up to 65 years, during which time the frequency of fires was altered at each site. We find that frequently burned plots experienced a decline in surface soil carbon and nitrogen that was non-saturating through time, having 36 per cent (±13 per cent) less carbon and 38 per cent (±16 per cent) less nitrogen after 64 years than plots that were protected from fire. Fire-driven carbon and nitrogen losses were substantial in savanna grasslands and broadleaf forests, but not in temperate and boreal needleleaf forests. We also observe comparable soil carbon and nitrogen losses in an independent field dataset and in dynamic model simulations of global vegetation. The model study predicts that the long-term losses of soil nitrogen that result from more frequent burning may in turn decrease the carbon that is sequestered by net primary productivity by about 20 per cent of the total carbon that is emitted from burning biomass over the same period. Furthermore, we estimate that the effects of changes in fire frequency on ecosystem carbon storage may be 30 per cent too low if they do not include multidecadal changes in soil carbon, especially in drier savanna grasslands. Future changes in fire frequency may shift ecosystem carbon storage by changing soil carbon pools and nitrogen limitations on plant growth, altering the carbon sink capacity of frequently burning savanna grasslands and broadleaf forests.

One paradigm in biogeochemistry is that frequent disturbance tends to deplete carbon (C) in soil organic matter (SOM) by reducing biomass inputs and promoting losses. However, disturbance by fire has challenged this paradigm because soil C responses to frequent and/or intense fires are highly variable, despite observed declines in biomass inputs. Here, we review recent advances to illustrate that fire-driven changes in decomposition, mediated by altered SOM stability, are an important compensatory process offsetting declines in aboveground biomass pools. Fire alters the stability of SOM by affecting both the physicochemical properties of the SOM and the environmental drivers of decomposition, potentially offsetting C lost via combustion, but the mechanisms affecting the SOM stability differ across ecosystems. Thus, shifting our focus from a top-down view of fire impacting C cycling via changes in plant biomass to a bottom-up view of changes in decomposition may help to elucidate counterintuitive trends in the response of SOM to burning. Given that 70% of global topsoil C is in fire-prone regions, using fire to promote SOM stability may be an important nature-based climate solution to increase C storage. Fires reduce plant biomass, which should deplete soil carbon stocks, but a review of recent literature shows that fires also slow decomposition rates and increase soil organic matter stability, offsetting aboveground biomass carbon losses.

Fire and nutrients interact to influence the global distribution and dynamics of the savanna biome, but the results of these interactions are both complex and poorly known. A critical but unresolved question is whether short-term losses of carbon and nutrients caused by fire can trigger long-term and potentially compensatory responses in the nutrient stoichiometry of plants, or in the abundance of dinitrogen-fixing trees. There is disagreement in the literature about the potential role of fire on savanna nutrients, and, in turn, on plant stoichiometry and composition. A major limitation has been the lack of fire manipulations over time scales sufficiently long for these interactions to emerge. We use a 58-year, replicated, large-scale, fire manipulation experiment in Kruger National Park (South Africa) in savanna to quantify the effect of fire on (1) distributions of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus at the ecosystem scale; (2) carbon : nitrogen : phosphorus stoichiometry of above- and belowground tissues of plant species; and (3) abundance of plant functional groups including nitrogen fixers. Our results show dramatic effects of fire on the relative distribution of nutrients in soils, but that individual plant stoichiometry and plant community composition remained unexpectedly resilient. Moreover, measures of nutrients and carbon stable isotopes allowed us to discount the role of tree cover change in favor of the turnover of herbaceous biomass as the primary mechanism that mediates a transition from low to high soil carbon and nutrients in the absence of fire. We conclude that, in contrast to extra-tropical grasslands or closed-canopy forests, vegetation in the savanna biome may be uniquely adapted to nutrient losses caused by recurring fire.

The determinants of fire-driven changes in soil organic carbon (SOC) across broad environmental gradients remains unclear, especially in global drylands. Here we combined datasets and field sampling of fire-manipulation experiments to evaluate where and why fire changes SOC and compared our statistical model to simulations from ecosystem models. Drier ecosystems experienced larger relative changes in SOC than humid ecosystems—in some cases exceeding losses from plant biomass pools—primarily explained by high fire-driven declines in tree biomass inputs in dry ecosystems. Many ecosystem models underestimated the SOC changes in drier ecosystems. Upscaling our statistical model predicted that soils in savannah–grassland regions may have gained 0.64 PgC due to net-declines in burned area over the past approximately two decades. Consequently, ongoing declines in fire frequencies have probably created an extensive carbon sink in the soils of global drylands that may have been underestimated by ecosystem models.Fire impacts soil organic carbon stocks, in addition to aboveground biomass, yet changes are not well constrained. This study shows that more soil carbon is lost from drier ecosystems than humid ones and that the carbon sink is increasing in savannah–grassland regions with declining burned area.

Tropical savannas are hypothesized to be hot spots of nitrogen-fixer diversity and activity because of the high disturbance and low nitrogen characteristic of savanna landscapes. Here we compare the abundances of nitrogen-fixing and non-fixing trees in both tropical savannas and tropical forests under climatically equivalent conditions, using plant inventory studies across 566 plots in South America and Africa. A single factor, aridity, explained 19-54% of the variance in fixer abundance, and unexpectedly was more important than fire frequency, biome, and continent. Nitrogen fixers were more abundant in arid environments; as a result, African savannas, which tend to be drier, were richer in nitrogen fixers than South American savannas. Fixer abundance converged on similar levels in forests in both continents. We conclude that climate plays a greater role than fire in determining the distribution of nitrogen fixers across tropical savanna and forest biomes.

Wildfire activity and the hydrological cycle are strongly interlinked. While it is well known that wildfire occurrence and intensity are controlled by water availability, less is known about the effects of wildfire on plant and soil water cycling, especially at large scales. Here we investigate this by analysing fire impacts on the coupling between plant and soil water content, at the global scale, using remote sensing of soil moisture, vegetation water content and burned area. We find a strong effect of fire on plant–soil water relations, accelerating soil moisture loss by 17% and leading to faster gains in vegetation water content by 62%, both of which are positively related to fire severity and largest in forests. This effect is spatially extensive, with accelerated soil moisture loss found in 67%, and increased vegetation water content gain found in 67% of all analysed burned areas. After fire, plants also tended to have less control on their water content (that is, were more anisohydric). In summary, fire changes ecosystem functioning by increasing ecosystem water losses and shifting the relationship between soil and vegetation water budgets. With climate change, wildfire is likely to play an increasingly important role in ecosystem water cycling and subsequent ecosystem recovery. Fire affects the hydrological interactions between soil and vegetation, leading to faster soil moisture loss and accelerated vegetation water uptake, according to a global analysis of satellite observations on soil moisture, vegetation water content and burned area.