Impact of vegetation on the methane budget of a temperate forest

What is it about?

Most global inventories of CH4 biological sink are based on soil flux data, but our results, based on continuous measurements, show that ignoring the interaction between vegetation and soil can bias these inventories. Indeed, the presence of understorey vegetation stimulates soil CH4 uptake while the emission of CH4 by tree trunks was three orders of magnitude less than the soil CH4 uptake. Taking into account the vegetation increases the CH4 sink by a factor of two.

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