Higher climatological temperature sensitivity of soil carbon in cold than warm climates

Arora, V. K. et al. Carbon-concentration and carbon–climate feedbacks in CMIP5 Earth System Models. J. Clim. 26, 5289–5314 (2013).

Ciais, P. et al. in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis (eds Stocker, T. F. et al.) 465–570 (IPCC, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013).

Koven, C. D. et al. Controls on terrestrial carbon feedbacks by productivity versus turnover in the CMIP5 Earth System Models. Biogeosciences 12, 5211–5228 (2015).

Carvalhais, N. et al. Global covariation of carbon turnover times with climate in terrestrial ecosystems. Nature 514, 213–217 (2014).

Ciais, P. et al. Large inert carbon pool in the terrestrial biosphere during the Last Glacial Maximum. Nat. Geosci. 5, 74–79 (2012).

Koven, C. D. et al. Permafrost carbon-climate feedbacks accelerate global warming. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 108, 14769–14774 (2011).

Mahecha, M. D. et al. Global convergence in the temperature sensitivity of respiration at ecosystem level. Science 329, 838–840 (2010).

Davidson, E. & Janssens, I. Temperature sensitivity of soil carbon decomposition and feedbacks to climate change. Nature 440, 165–173 (2006).

Jenkinson, D., Adams, D. & Wild, A. Model estimates Of CO₂ emissions from soil in response to global warming. Nature 351, 304–306 (1991).

Allison, S. D., Wallenstein, M. D. & Bradford, M. A. Soil-carbon response to warming dependent on microbial physiology. Nat. Geosci. 3, 336–340 (2010).

Wieder, W. R., Bonan, G. B. & Allison, S. D. Global soil carbon projections are improved by modelling microbial processes. Nat. Clim. Change 3, 909–912 (2013).

Tang, J. & Riley, W. J. Weaker soil carbon-climate feedbacks resulting from microbial and abiotic interactions. Nat. Clim. Change 5, 56–60 (2015).

Bradford, M. A. et al. Thermal adaptation of soil microbial respiration to elevated temperature. Ecol. Lett. 11, 1316–1327 (2008).

Hugelius, G. et al. Estimated stocks of circumpolar permafrost carbon with quantified uncertainty ranges and identified data gaps. Biogeosciences 11, 6573–6593 (2014).

Jones, C. et al. Twenty-first-century compatible CO₂ emissions and airborne fraction simulated by CMIP5 earth system models under four Representative Concentration Pathways. J. Clim. 26, 4398–4413 (2013).

Bradford, M. A. et al. Managing uncertainty in soil carbon feedbacks to climate change. Nat. Clim. Change 6, 751–758 (2016).

Todd-Brown, K. E. O. et al. Causes of variation in soil carbon simulations from CMIP5 Earth System Models and comparison with observations. Biogeosciences 10, 1717–1736 (2013).

He, Y. et al. Radiocarbon constraints imply reduced carbon uptake by soils during the 21st century. Science 353, 1419–1424 (2016).

Crowther, T. W. et al. Quantifying global soil carbon losses in response to warming. Nature 540, 104–108 (2016).

Jenny, H. Factors of Soil Formation: A System of Quantitative Pedology (Courier Corporation, 2016).

Post, W. M., Emanuel, W. R., Zinke, P. J. & Stangenberger, A. G. Soil carbon pools and world life zones. Nature 298, 156–159 (1982).

Raich, J. W. & Schlesinger, W. H. The global carbon dioxide flux in soil respiration and its relationship to vegetation and climate. Tellus B 44, 81–99 (1992).

Doetterl, S. et al. Soil carbon storage controlled by interactions between geochemistry and climate. Nat. Geosci. 8, 780–783 (2015).

Giardina, C. P. & Ryan, M. G. Evidence that decomposition rates of organic carbon in mineral soil do not vary with temperature. Nature 404, 858–861 (2000).

Lloyd, J. & Taylor, J. On the temperature-dependence of soil respiration. Funct. Ecol. 8, 315–323 (1994).

Harden, J. W. et al. Field information links permafrost carbon to physical vulnerabilities of thawing. Geophys. Res. Lett. 39, L15704 (2012).

Koven, C. D. et al. The effect of vertically-resolved soil biogeochemistry and alternate soil C and N models on C dynamics of CLM4. Biogeosciences 10, 7109–7131 (2013).

Koven, C. D., Lawrence, D. M. & Riley, W. J. Permafrost carbon-climate feedback is sensitive to deep soil carbon decomposability but not deep soil nitrogen dynamics. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 112, 3752–3757 (2015).

Wang, Y. P. et al. Responses of two nonlinear microbial models to warming and increased carbon input. Biogeosciences 13, 887–902 (2016).

Sistla, S. A. et al. Long-term warming restructures Arctic tundra without changing net soil carbon storage. Nature 497, 615–618 (2013).

FAO, IIASA, ISRIC, ISSCAS & JRC Harmonized World Soil Database (version 1.2) (FAO and IIASA, 2012).

Hugelius, G. et al. The Northern Circumpolar Soil Carbon Database: spatially distributed datasets of soil coverage and soil carbon storage in the northern permafrost regions. Earth Syst. Sci. Data 5, 3–13 (2013).

Zhao, M., Heinsch, F., Nemani, R. & Running, S. Improvements of the MODIS terrestrial gross and net primary production global data set. Remote Sens. Environ. 95, 164–176 (2005).

Harris, I., Jones, P. D., Osborn, T. J. & Lister, D. H. Updated high-resolution grids of monthly climatic observations the CRU TS3.10 Dataset. Int. J. Climatol. 34, 623–642 (2014).

Schneider, U. et al. GPCC Full Data Reanalysis Version 6.0 at 0.5°: Monthly Land-Surface Precipitation from Rain-Gauges built on GTS-based and Historic Data. (2011); http://doi.org/10.5676/DWD_GPCC/FD_M_V6_050

Mu, Q., Zhao, M. & Running, S. W. Improvements to a MODIS global terrestrial evapotranspiration algorithm. Remote Sens. Environ. 115, 1781–1800 (2011).

Slater, A. et al. The representation of snow in land surface schemes: results from PILPS 2(d). J. Hydrometeorol. 2, 7–25 (2001).

Slater, A. G., Lawrence, D. M. & Koven, C. D. Process-level model evaluation: a snow and heat transfer metric. Cryosphere Discuss. 2016, 1–16 (2016).

Oleson, K. W. et al. Technical Description of version 4.0 of the Community Land Model (CLM) (National Center for Atmospheric Research, 2016).

Raddatz, T. J. et al. Will the tropical land biosphere dominate the climate-carbon cycle feedback during the twenty-first century? Clim. Dynam. 29, 565–574 (2007).

Jones, C. D. et al. The HadGEM2-ES implementation of CMIP5 centennial simulations. Geosci. Model Dev. 4, 543–570 (2011).

Krinner, G. et al. A dynamic global vegetation model for studies of the coupled atmosphere-biosphere system. Glob. Biogeochem. Cycles 19, GB1015 (2005).

Milly, P. C. D. et al. An enhanced model of land water and energy for global hydrologic and earth-system studies. J. Hydrometeorol. 15, 1739–1761 (2014).

Slater, A. G. & Lawrence, D. M. Diagnosing present and future permafrost from climate models. J. Clim. 26, 5608–5623 (2013).

Koven, C. D., Riley, W. J. & Stern, A. Analysis of permafrost thermal dynamics and response to climate change in the CMIP5 Earth System Models. J. Clim. 26, 1877–1900 (2012).

Sato, H., Itoh, A. & Kohyama, T. SEIB–DGVM: a new Dynamic Global Vegetation Model using a spatially explicit individual-based approach. Ecol. Model. 200, 279–307 (2007).