Grasslands won’t help buffer climate change as carbon dioxide levels rise

In a new study in the premier open access journal PLoS Biology Jeffrey Dukes, Christopher Field, and colleagues treated grassland plots to every possible combination of current or increased levels of four environmental factors--CO2, temperature, precipitation, and nitrogen influx--to simulate likely regional changes over the next 100 years. The results of their long-term experiment reveal that California grasslands, and ecosystems that respond similarly, are not likely to help buffer the rate of climate change by acting as a carbon 'sink'--slowing the rise of CO2 levels by storing more carbon in new growth.