New publication Soil Moisture Controls on Ecosystem Respiration Across Australia
Eva-Marie Metz and co-authors present a comprehensive analysis of how soil water availability shapes terrestrial ecosystem respiration (TER) across the Australian continent.
The team used nighttime net ecosystem exchange (NEE) data from 40 eddy-covariance stations of the OzFlux network, spanning Australia’s full climatic gradient from arid to humid ecosystems. Their analysis shows that TER sensitivity to soil moisture peaks in semi-arid regions . In these water-limited sites, TER becomes particularly responsive to soil moisture under warm conditions, whereas humid regions show large fluxes but little water limitation.
By benchmarking the dynamic global vegetation model LPJ against these observations, the study reveals that TER parametrization in LPJ currently fails to reproduce observed patterns. This shortcoming arises from interactions with carbon substrate availability and inadequate soil hydrology representations.
The results highlight the need for including non-linear formulations of TER in vegetation models to improve their performance and predictions of carbon–climate feedbacks under increasing drought and heat extremes.
Eva-Marie Metz, Sanam N. Vardag, Andrew F. Feldman, Benjamin Poulter, Thomas Colligan, Brenden J. Fischer-Femal and André Butz, Responses of terrestrial ecosystem respiration to soil moisture across Australia, 2025, Environ. Res. Lett. 20 104052