On March 11, 2022, the latest research results of Professor Wan Shiqiang's team were presented with the "Increased precipitation and nitrogen addition accelerate the temporal increase of soil respiration during eight-year old-field grassland succession" The topic was published online in Global Change Biology, the international flagship journal of Global Change Ecology (2021-2022 impact factor 10.863, 5-year impact factor 11.716, ranking fifth among 166 ecological SCI journals). The first author of the paper is Professor Wan Shiqiang's doctoral candidate Zhang Jiajia, and Henan University is the first unit and communication unit of this paper.
The 2°C target became a global consensus after the 2009 Climate Change Conference, and the 1.5°C target became a new hot spot after the 2015 Climate Change Conference. China's carbon emissions are in absolute terms, and the pressure to reduce emissions is unprecedented. However, President Xi Jinping's pledge at the UN General Assembly to "strive to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and strive to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060" fully demonstrates China's good international image as a responsible major country. Countries around the world are also striving to restore, consolidate and enhance terrestrial carbon sinks through strategies and measures such as afforestation and ecological restoration to mitigate the process of climate change. However, under the global change scenario, there is still great uncertainty about the extent to which ecological restoration strategies and measures can improve the understanding of terrestrial carbon sinks.
Professor Wan Shiqiang's team elucidated the temporal law of soil respiration (CO2 release) response to simulated rainfall and atmospheric nitrogen deposition in a long-term (2012-2019) global change control experiment in abandoned grasslands. It was found that the rate of soil carbon CO2 release increased linearly with time during the secondary succession of abandoned grassland under natural environmental conditions, while the increase of precipitation and nitrogen addition further aggravated the soil carbon emission rate in the process of grassland succession. This finding suggests that in future climate change scenarios, increased water and nitrogen availability may accelerate soil carbon emissions during ecological restoration, thereby reducing the rate of soil carbon accumulation in terrestrial ecosystems. This achievement can provide systematic scientific evidence and theoretical support for the country to achieve the goal of "carbon peak and carbon neutrality" by "consolidating the carbon sink capacity of ecosystems and increasing the carbon sink capacity of ecosystems" and "continuously consolidating and improving carbon sink capacity".
