Fertilisation experiments have demonstrated that nutrient availability is a key determinant of biomass production and carbon sequestration in grasslands. However, the influence of nutrients in explaining spatial variation in grassland biomass production has rarely been assessed. Using a global dataset comprising 72 sites on six continents, we investigated which of 16 soil factors that shape nutrient availability associate most...

Droughts can strongly affect grassland productivity and biodiversity, but responses differ widely. Nutrient availability may be a critical factor explaining this variation, but is often ignored in analyses of drought responses. Here, we used a standardized nutrient addition experiment covering 10 European grasslands to test if full‐factorial nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium addition affected plant community responses to int...

VALUE is an open European collaboration to intercompare downscaling approaches for climate change research, focusing on different validation aspects (marginal, temporal, extremes, spatial, process‐based, etc.). Here we describe the participating methods and first results from the first experiment, using “perfect” reanalysis (and reanalysis‐driven regional climate model (RCM)) predictors to assess the intrinsic performance of t...

The magnitude of the interannual variability of North Atlantic air-sea CO2 fluxes remains uncertain. Interannual extremes simulated by atmospheric inverse approaches are typically about ±0.3 Pg C yr−1, whereas those from ocean models are less than ±0.1 Pg C yr−1. Thus variability in the North Atlantic is either about 60% or less than 20% of the global variability of about ±0.5 Pg C yr−1 (as estimated by both approaches). Here...