Science for society
Countless bacteria, plants, animals, and other organisms that live in an ecosystem regulate how far an ecosystem is functioning as a net carbon sink or a net carbon source. A main question arises: how does this biologically driven regulation, often referred to as ecosystem metabolism, respond to global warming? To answer this question, which is not only important for the understanding of ecosystems being net carbon sinks or sources but also of biodiversity, meteorological and eddy covariance measurements from highly diverse ecosystems around the world were analyzed. The analyses demonstrate that warming rapidly accelerates both the carbon uptake by organisms that live in an ecosystem and the carbon release, independent of the ecosystem type. Thus, despite possible fast changes in biodiversity under the ongoing global warming trend, ecosystem metabolism is generally resilient to warming, a finding that strongly influences the choice of climate change mitigation actions.