Understanding not only how much atmospheric CO2 plants absorb through photosynthesis, but also how much they are able to retain or transform into organic carbon, is crucial to combating climate change. An international team, including Alessio Collalti, principal investigator at the Institute for Mediterranean Agricultural and Forestry Systems (CNR-Isafom), used global data from "eddy covariance" flux towers, instruments that monitor carbon exchange between the Earth and the atmosphere, to create the largest database on "carbon use efficiency" (CUE) in vegetation. The study, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, fills a historical gap by producing more than 2,700 estimates of CUE on a global scale, a tenfold increase in the number of data available to date. The team integrated the observations with recent ecological theories and advanced statistical methods to estimate the net balance between photosynthesis and respiration in different terrestrial ecosystems.
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