Progress in the studies on carbon cycle in terrestrial ecosystem

The concentration of the atmospheric CO 2, one of the most important greenhouse gases, is increasing since the beginning of industrialization from its pre-industrial value of 280ppmv to its present value of 366ppmv. It has been proved that human activities, including fossil fuel burning, cement production, and land-use change, have severely disrupted the model of the carbon cycle, thereby alter the climate system and affect the processes and mechanisms in terrestrial ecosystems. Understanding the consequences of these changes in the coming decades is critical for the formulation of political, economic, energy, and security policies. So recently,studies in carbon cycle have increasingly become a focus of global change and geo-science in the world. The terrestrial ecosystem,one of the most important parts of the global carbon cycle, is most complex and most greatly affected by human activities. This paper, combined with the latest reports related to carbon cycle in IGBP and IPCC, introduces some major carbon pools, namely, lithosphere, atmosphere, ocean,and terrestrial ecosystem,in the global carbon cycle and their sizes and characteristics. Furthermore, four major approaches, including inventories method, eddy covariance measurements, inverse modeling and model of carbon cycle, which have been used to evaluate the biosphere-atmospheric exchange of CO 2in the terrestrial ecosystems,are introduced. Using inventories method we can get an estimate of the actual accumulation of carbon in terrestrial ecosystem. The eddy covariance approach can detect small changes in net CO 2exchange between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere over various time scales. Inverse modeling approach can be used to infer carbon sources or sinks based on 3-D atmospheric tracer transport models and CO 2 records from the atmospheric observations, fossil fuel combustion and land use change. Model of carbon cycle is a powerful tool to estimate and evaluate the temporal and spatial patterns of carbon sources or sinks in various scales. The existing problems of using these four methods are also analyzed. Moreover, the uncertainties in terrestrial carbon process are analyzed particularly.Additionally,some problems unsettled in carbon cycle and development tendency are specified concisely.