Purpose of Review Forests play a crucial role in carbon sequestration and storage, yet uncertainty remains about carbon stocks and sequestration differences between managed and unmanaged forests, which has resulted in considerable scientific and policy debate. This review synthesizes European evidence comparing managed and unmanaged forests addressing three questions: (1) what are the differences in carbon stock and sequestrat...

Anthropogenic climate change is altering precipitation regimes at a global scale. While precipitation changes have been linked to changes in the abundance and diversity of soil and litter invertebrate fauna in forests, general trends have remained elusive due to mixed results from primary studies. We used a meta‐analysis based on 430 comparisons from 38 primary studies to address associated knowledge gaps, (i) quantifying impa...

Over 50 years ago, Eugene Odum postulated that mature or climax forests reside in carbon neutrality. As climate change rose to prominence in the international environmental agenda, the neutrality hypothesis transformed from an ecological principle to a justification for using forest management in combating climate change. Despite persistent efforts, Odum's neutrality hypothesis has resisted both confirmation and refutation. In...

As the applications of Earth system models ( ESM s) move from general climate projections toward questions of mitigation and adaptation, the inclusion of land management practices in these models becomes crucial. We carried out a survey among modeling groups to show an evolution from models able only to deal with land‐cover change to more sophisticated approaches that allow also for the partial integration of land management c...

In the light of daunting global sustainability challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss and food security, improving our understanding of the complex dynamics of the Earth system is crucial. However, large knowledge gaps related to the effects of land management persist, in particular those human‐induced changes in terrestrial ecosystems that do not result in land‐cover conversions. Here, we review the current stat...

Forest autotrophic respiration ( R a ) plays an important role in the carbon balance of forest ecosystems. However, its drivers at the global scale are not well known. Based on a global forest database, we explore the relationships of annual R a with mean annual temperature (MAT) and biotic factors including net primary productivity (NPP), total biomass, stand age, mean tree height, and maximum leaf area index (LAI). The resul...

The intensification of the hydrological cycle, with an observed and modeled increase in drought incidence and severity, underscores the need to quantify drought effects on carbon cycling and the terrestrial sink. FLUXNET, a global network of eddy covariance towers, provides dense data streams of meteorological data, and through flux partitioning and gap filling algorithms, estimates of net ecosystem productivity ( F NEP ), gro...

Over the last two and half decades, strong evidence showed that the terrestrial ecosystems are acting as a net sink for atmospheric carbon. However the spatial and temporal patterns of variation in the sink are not well known. In this study, we examined latitudinal patterns of interannual variability (IAV) in net ecosystem exchange (NEE) of CO 2 based on 163 site‐years of eddy covariance data, from 39 northern‐hemisphere resea...

An accurate prediction of the spatial distribution of litterfall can improve insight in the interaction between the canopy layer and forest floor characteristics, which is a key feature in forest nutrient cycling. Attempts to model the spatial variability of litterfall have been made across forest types, but the reported models have not yet been compared. We predicted the spatial distribution of leaf litterfall for the same mi...