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- Multiple-oxygen isotope constraints on aerobic respiration and gross primary productivity
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