Afforestation is a widely accepted practice to build terrestrial carbon sinks, but its applications are limited by climatic conditions. Recently, Noor et al. (2026) demonstrate that ecological restoration (China’s Three-North Protective Forest Program, TNP) is transforming hyperarid environment into a carbon sink, providing an encouraging projection for carbon sink built up through afforestation, and extrapolating it to the entire Taklamakan Desert. However, given extremely limited effective water to plants in the region, potential ecohydrological processes derived from nonfield data could easily misinterpreted real field cases…
Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) | Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
Topics: Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences- Correction for Zhou et al., Warming substantially amplifies Antarctic coastal polynyas as key carbon sinks
- Correction for Brown et al., Deuterated water and the formation of the satellites of Uranus
- Direct dating of 3.5 Ga biogenic carbon in a microbial mat remnant, Singhbhum Craton, India
- Coreless exoplanets induced by metal–silicate miscibility
- The distribution and origin of Mercury’s crustal magnetization
- Near-total loss of buttressing stresses observed on Pine Island Ice Shelf, West Antarctica
- Strong human fingerprint on low snowpack amid increasing volatility
- Contrasting marine and terrestrial responses of South Asian summer monsoon system caused by hemispheric insolation
- The origin and development of the Miocene northwest African savanna
- A transient global warming event during Earth’s penultimate icehouse
