Decadal sink-source shifts of forest aboveground carbon since 1988.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 42533003.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-026-76093-3 and PMC identifier 13424356.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Forest ecosystems are vital to the global carbon cycle, yet their long-term aboveground carbon (AGC) dynamics remain uncertain. Here, we integrate multi-source satellite observations with probabilistic deep learning models to reconstruct a harmonized, uncertainty-aware global forest AGC record from 1988 to 2021 at 0.25<sup>∘</sup>. We find that, although global forests sequestered 6.2 PgC, moist tropical and boreal forests have progressively transitioned toward carbon sources since the early 2000s. Tropical AGC variability became increasingly negatively correlated with atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> growth rates (r = - 0.63 in 2011-2021), suggesting tropical forests increasingly modulate the global carbon cycle. In the Brazilian Amazon, the contribution of intact forests to the year-to-year variations in AGC losses increased from 33% in the 1990s to 76% in the 2010s. Our findings highlight the vulnerability of carbon stocks in key biomes and provide a benchmark to track emerging sink-source shifts under anthropogenic climate change.