Proposal for FNCA climate change science research project; Japan

Nagai, Haruyasu  ; Koarashi, Jun   ; Atarashi-Andoh, Mariko  

The proposed project aims to understand processes driving carbon cycling in terrestrial ecosystems and their sensitivity to changes in environment, and to predict carbon cycle feedback to climate change. We focus on soil organic carbon (SOC) in the terrestrial ecosystems. There is growing concern that global warming can lead to accelerated microbial decomposition of SOC and enhance the release of CO from the soil to the atmosphere. Therefore, understanding the response of SOC to global warming is the key to predicting future climate change. Predicting the response of SOC to global warming requires quantitative evaluation of the SOC decomposability. Our approach is the use of C analysis to quantify the decomposability of SOC as a complex of SOC pools characterized by their carbon stocks and specific mean residence times (MRTs). We also introduce a unique methodology using the nuclear test-derived C in the analysis. We aim to expand this study into global scale with the collaboration between FNCA member countries.