Stomatal pores on plant leaves regulate the gain of carbon through photosynthesis and the loss of water through transpiration. Through their responses to environmental conditions, stomata can constrain plant productivity and transpiration fluxes, exerting a strong control on climate feedbacks over land. Although mechanistic modelling of stomata remains a challenge, semi‐empirical and optimisation models have been successfully...

Aim Comprehensive, global information on species' occurrences is an essential biodiversity variable and central to a range of applications in ecology, evolution, biogeography and conservation. Expert range maps often represent a species' only available distributional information and play an increasing role in conservation assessments and macroecology. We provide global range maps for the native ranges of all extant mammal spec...

Wood growth constitutes the main process for long‐term atmospheric carbon sequestration in vegetation. However, our understanding of the process of wood growth and its response to environmental drivers is limited. Current dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) are mainly photosynthesis‐driven and thus do not explicitly include a direct environmental effect on tree growth. However, physiological evidence suggests that, to rea...

Climatically controlled allocation to reproduction is a key mechanism by which climate influences tree growth and may explain lagged correlations between climate and growth. We used continent‐wide datasets of tree‐ring chronologies and annual reproductive effort in Fagus sylvatica from 1901 to 2015 to characterise relationships between climate, reproduction and growth. Results highlight that variable allocation to reproduction...

Turnover concepts in state‐of‐the‐art global vegetation models ( GVM s) account for various processes, but are often highly simplified and may not include an adequate representation of the dominant processes that shape vegetation carbon turnover rates in real forest ecosystems at a large spatial scale. Here, we evaluate vegetation carbon turnover processes in GVM s participating in the Inter‐Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparis...

A better understanding of the mechanisms controlling the magnitude and sign of carbon components in tropical forest ecosystems is important for reliable estimation of this important regional component of the global carbon cycle. We used the JULES vegetation model to simulate all components of the carbon balance at six sites along an Andes‐Amazon transect across Peru and Brazil and compared the results to published field measur...

Measurements of the net CO 2 flux between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere using the eddy covariance technique have the potential to underpin our interpretation of regional CO 2 source–sink patterns, CO 2 flux responses to forcings, and predictions of the future terrestrial C balance. Information contained in FLUXNET eddy covariance data has multiple uses for the development and application of global carbon models, in...

Summary The possible responses of ecosystem processes to rising atmospheric CO 2 concentration and climate change are illustrated using six dynamic global vegetation models that explicitly represent the interactions of ecosystem carbon and water exchanges with vegetation dynamics. The models are driven by the IPCC IS92a scenario of rising CO 2 ( Wigley et al . 1991 ), and by climate changes resulting from effective CO 2 concen...

Summary A nonequilibrium, dynamic, global vegetation model, Hybrid v4.1, with a subdaily timestep, was driven by increasing CO 2 and transient climate output from the UK Hadley Centre GCM (HadCM2) with simulated daily and interannual variability. Three IPCC emission scenarios were used: (i) IS92a, giving 790 ppm CO 2 by 2100, (ii) CO 2 stabilization at 750 ppm by 2225, and (iii) CO 2 stabilization at 550 ppm by 2150. Land use...