Elevated carbon dioxide (eCO 2 ) acts as a fertiliser for photosynthesis, driving an increase in gross primary production (GPP). However, it is unclear how effectively increased GPP propagates along the ‘carbon (C) cascade’ to increase net primary production (NPP) and vegetation C stocks ( C veg ) in different plant compartments. Vegetation models were criticised for being overly sensitive to photosynthesis (source‐driven), ne...

Dryland ecosystems cover 41% of Earth's land surfaces, account for 44% of cultivated lands and 60% of food sources, and make large contributions to the global water and carbon cycles. However, these ecosystems are experiencing unprecedented extremes including heatwaves, floods, and droughts as well as hotter temperatures and often declining water resource availability. These ecosystems are some of the most challenging to monit...

Climate warming is expected to increase global methane (CH 4 ) emissions from wetland ecosystems. Although in situ eddy covariance (EC) measurements at ecosystem scales can potentially detect CH 4 flux changes, most EC systems have only a few years of data collected, so temporal trends in CH 4 remain uncertain. Here, we use established drivers to hindcast changes in CH 4 fluxes (FCH 4 ) since the early 1980s. We trained a mach...

The recent rise in atmospheric methane (CH 4 ) concentrations accelerates climate change and offsets mitigation efforts. Although wetlands are the largest natural CH 4 source, estimates of global wetland CH 4 emissions vary widely among approaches taken by bottom‐up (BU) process‐based biogeochemical models and top‐down (TD) atmospheric inversion methods. Here, we integrate in situ measurements, multi‐model ensembles, and a mac...

The increasing frequency and intensity of climate extremes and complex ecosystem responses motivate the need for integrated observational studies at low latency to determine biosphere responses and carbon‐climate feedbacks. Here, we develop a satellite‐based rapid attribution workflow and demonstrate its use at a 1–2‐month latency to attribute drivers of the carbon cycle feedbacks during the 2020–2021 Western US drought and he...

Forest carbon is a large and uncertain component of the global carbon cycle. An important source of complexity is the spatial heterogeneity of vegetation vertical structure and extent, which results from variations in climate, soils, and disturbances and influences both contemporary carbon stocks and fluxes. Recent advances in remote sensing and ecosystem modeling have the potential to significantly improve the characterizatio...

Wetlands are the largest natural source of methane (CH 4 ) to the atmosphere. The eddy covariance method provides robust measurements of net ecosystem exchange of CH 4 , but interpreting its spatiotemporal variations is challenging due to the co‐occurrence of CH 4 production, oxidation, and transport dynamics. Here, we estimate these three processes using a data‐model fusion approach across 25 wetlands in temperate, boreal, an...

Aim Each year, wild and managed fires burn roughly 4 million km 2 [~400 million hectares (Mha)] of savanna, forest, grassland and agricultural ecosystems. Land use and climate change have altered fire regimes throughout the world, with a trend toward higher‐severity fires found from Australia, the Americas, Europe and Asia, to the Arctic. In 2020, there were notable catastrophic fires in Australia (in the 2019/20 Austral fire...

The ongoing development of the Global Carbon Project (GCP) global methane (CH 4 ) budget shows a continuation of increasing CH 4 emissions and CH 4 accumulation in the atmosphere during 2000–2017. Here, we decompose the global budget into 19 regions (18 land and 1 oceanic) and five key source sectors to spatially attribute the observed global trends. A comparison of top‐down (TD) (atmospheric and transport model‐based) and bot...

While wetlands are the largest natural source of methane (CH 4 ) to the atmosphere, they represent a large source of uncertainty in the global CH 4 budget due to the complex biogeochemical controls on CH 4 dynamics. Here we present, to our knowledge, the first multi‐site synthesis of how predictors of CH 4 fluxes (FCH4) in freshwater wetlands vary across wetland types at diel, multiday (synoptic), and seasonal time scales. We...

Forecasts of future forest change are governed by ecosystem sensitivity to climate change, but ecosystem model projections are under‐constrained by data at multidecadal and longer timescales. Here, we quantify ecosystem sensitivity to centennial‐scale hydroclimate variability, by comparing dendroclimatic and pollen‐inferred reconstructions of drought, forest composition and biomass for the last millennium with five ecosystem m...

In an era of rapid global change, our ability to understand and predict Earth's natural systems is lagging behind our ability to monitor and measure changes in the biosphere. Bottlenecks to informing models with observations have reduced our capacity to fully exploit the growing volume and variety of available data. Here, we take a critical look at the information infrastructure that connects ecosystem modeling and measurement...

Tropical peat forests are a globally important reservoir of carbon, but little is known about CO 2 exchange on an annual basis. We measured CO 2 exchange between the atmosphere and tropical peat swamp forest in Sarawak, Malaysia using the eddy covariance technique over 4 years from 2011 to 2014. The CO 2 fluxes varied between seasons and years. A small carbon uptake took place during the rainy season at the beginning of 2011,...

Changing amplitude of the seasonal cycle of atmospheric CO 2 (SCA) in the northern hemisphere is an emerging carbon cycle property. Mauna Loa (MLO) station (20°N, 156°W), which has the longest continuous northern hemisphere CO 2 record, shows an increasing SCA before the 1980s ( p 2 fertilization. This challenges the view that CO 2 fertilization is the dominant cause of emergent SCA trends at northern sites south of 40°N. The...

Large‐scale terrestrial carbon (C) estimating studies using methods such as atmospheric inversion, biogeochemical modeling, and field inventories have produced different results. The goal of this study was to integrate fine‐scale processes including land use and land cover change into a large‐scale ecosystem framework. We analyzed the terrestrial C budget of the conterminous United States from 1971 to 2015 at 1‐km resolution u...

Plants use only a fraction of their photosynthetically derived carbon for biomass production (BP). The biomass production efficiency (BPE), defined as the ratio of BP to photosynthesis, and its variation across and within vegetation types is poorly understood, which hinders our capacity to accurately estimate carbon turnover times and carbon sinks. Here, we present a new global estimation of BPE obtained by combining field mea...