This paper discusses the carbon capture by poorly studied cold-water corals. These coral mounds represent a lesser known part of the carbon cycle and the outcomes of the study highlight the importance of these structures for natural carbon capture and storage at the sea floor.

Peltigera clouds? This fascinating manuscript demonstrates the potential of Peltigera lichens from across a range of ecosystems to generate potent biological ice nucleators. These Peltigera lichen ice nucleators can be more potent than the bacteria Pseudomonas syringae, which is often viewed as the most efficient biological ice nucleators. Given the widespread occurrence of Peltigera across the globe, these lichen may be important contributors to biological ice nucleation.

This paper reveals a previously unrecognized bias in the marine sediment record, challenging conventional interpretations of long-term carbon sequestration and weathering trends. While biases in the fossil and geological records are well-studied, this study demonstrates that deep-sea sedimentation data are also systematically skewed, necessitating a critical reevaluation of widely used paleoceanographic proxies. As a comprehensive meta-analysis of marine core data, these findings have far-reaching implications, highlighting the need to account for age-dependent biases in sedimentation-related proxies to refine our understanding of Earth's past climate and carbon cycle dynamics.

This study presents new insights into autotrophic carbon fixation in shallow-water hydrothermal systems, emphasizing the dominance of reductive tricarboxylic acid (rTCA) cycle-utilizing Campylobacteria. Low isotopic fractionation values in vent fluids, possibly due to very acidic pH levels, extend the isotopic fractionation range of rTCA. The study also highlights the ecological significance of chemosynthetically fixed carbon, observed in higher trophic levels like the vent endemic crab Xenograpsus testudinatus, improving our understanding of carbon cycling in extreme environments and the interplay between microbial chemosynthesis and higher organisms.

This study presents a new methodology to address the divergent projections of Net Primary Production in the North Atlantic Ocean in the last phase 6 of CMIP. The method is based on the process-based selection of models in the different ocean regions. This method can contribute to improve the reliability of climate change impact assessments on ecosystems and human societies.

This study reveals that size-normalized weight (SNW) in planktonic foraminifera varies by species and environment, making it unsuitable as a universal pCO2 proxy. Regional calibration and species-specific approaches are essential for reliable paleoceanographic reconstructions.

This paper warrants selection as a highlight due to its comprehensive synthesis of ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) impacts on marine calcifiers, offering essential insights for understanding potential ecological risks of this climate mitigation approach. By leveraging data from 96 studies and capturing responses across eleven biological groups, the paper establishes a predictive framework for biological responses to OAE. This work addresses a critical gap in OAE research, providing a precautionary guideline that can inform future studies, guide regional applications, and communicate risks to stakeholders.

The authors show the effects of elevated seawater pH and alkalinity on the ecophysiology (i.e., growth rate and cellular particulate inorganic and organic carbon) of marine ubiquitous calcifying coccolithophore species Emiliania huxleyi through laboratory experiments to discuss the ecological implications of ocean alkalinity enhancement, a key strategy of marine carbon dioxide removal.

Assessing the efficiency and durability of marine carbon dioxide removal (CDR) requires the development of clear measurement, reporting, and verification protocols. In this contribution, Michael Tyke presents a path forward into the robust quantification of marine CDR, presenting and explaining how different metrics can be used, providing new tools for modellers, observationalists, and policymakers.

This paper provides a critical evaluation of decadal trends in wetland methane emissions, offering robust insights into how climate change is driving increases in this potent greenhouse gas. By utilizing an ensemble of sixteen models alongside ground-based measurements, the paper provides a robust quantification of emission trends and associated uncertainties. As an international collaboration, this work contributes a comprehensive analysis that not only quantifies recent trends but also identifies temperature as the primary driver, offering essential information for predicting and managing future methane feedbacks.

This paper examines the effects of ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) on a key biogeochemical process: the biological carbon pump. The findings suggest that, under the conditions studied, the biological pump will largely remain unaffected by OAE. Gaining insights into how such interventions influence complex oceanographic processes at the ecosystem level is essential for assessing both the efficacy and safety of OAE.

The work documents the progress in modelling the terrestrial biosphere by including more biology. A new generation of global dynamic vegetation models contributing to the most recent phase of CMIP has included feedbacks between biogeochemical cycling and vegetation development and show improved simulation of photosynthesis. Other model challenges, such as the simulation of leaf area index and carbon pool dynamics still pertain.

This study, pertinent to astrobiology, utilizes the Atacama Desert as an analog for conditions on Mars. The findings indicate that nitrate-rich environments on Mars may preserve potential biosignatures and provide insights into the boundaries of life. This relationship supports the objectives of ongoing and upcoming Mars missions.

In their study, Hoffmann and co-workers provide new exciting data on the role of organic ligands in supporting elevated dissolved iron in hydrothermal vent plumes. The authors were able to detect siderophores (including amphiphilic types) in hydrothermal plumes at different sites along a 1,700 km section of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, pointing to microbial utilization of siderophores to access particulate hydrothermal iron.

This study presents FLUXCOM-X, a new modelling framework for terrestrial biogenic fluxes that builds on the widely used FLUXCOM observation-based dataset. FLUXCOM-X provides higher resolution water and carbon flux estimates (0.05 degree and hourly estimates), as well as a flexible framework for exploring the impact of methodological choices on the flux estimates, including the impact of machine learning approaches and input data selection and processing steps.

The use of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) techniques is essential to achieving the objectives of the Paris agreements. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to introduce negative emission technologies as soon as possible. Among these technologies, CDRs, and more particularly CDRs applied to land surfaces, seem to be good candidates. However, until now, the methodologies used to estimate the efficiency of CDRs have taken very little account of certain parameters such as the turnover time of biomass products. This article proposes an innovative methodology for this purpose and applies it to estimate the storage potential of various CDRs. Results suggest, for example, that afforestation/reforestation (AR) appears to be more effective in China, while bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is more effective in South America and Africa. Nevertheless, the authors also highlight the importance of considering the evolution of the efficiency of fossil fuel substitution (FFS) techniques in parallel to refine the estimate of the potential of CDRs, thus stressing the complexity of such a task.

This proof-of-concept study demonstrates that high-resolution seafloor substrate maps and spatial organic carbon models can be used to estimate the organic carbon on the seafloor. This information is critical for evaluating the carbon sequestration capacity of continental shelves and their relevance for climate regulation.

This study proposes revising the effect sizes of land use on SOC stock across the UK using a large dataset and a more robust analysis. It may serve as the basis for new reports of the nationwide land use emissions following the guidelines of the UNFCCC agreement. In addition, the study demonstrates the limitation of the space-for-time substitution assumption for estimating these effects.

This study documents a unique and highly efficient process of particulate organic carbon (POC) transfer from a major river estuary to the deep ocean. By providing the first direct observations of Congo River-derived POC at significant depths, the study reveals how both turbidity currents and tidal forces facilitate the movement of large carbon quantities to the Congo deep-sea fan, 1,200 km from the river mouth. Given that the Congo River contributes about 7% of the total organic carbon from the world's rivers, the findings highlight a potentially underestimated component of the global carbon cycle, making this research crucial for refining carbon cycle models and understanding carbon dynamics along the land-ocean continuum.

Drained peatlands are a substantial global CO2 source. Using an unprecedented monitoring network, this paper shows that using subsurface water infiltration systems effectively limits CO2 emissions, which can be predicted by carbon exposure. This is a nice example of how adapted management can substantially reduce CO2 emissions from drained peatlands.

Large-scale afforestation and reforestation are today seen as an important global climate mitigation strategy. The study investigates the climate feedbacks from afforestation and reforestation with a focus on hydrodynamic processes. The study shows that feedbacks on precipitation and local temperature are more complex and that is important to look beyond carbon cycle feedbacks when it comes to the implementation of climate mitigation strategies.

This manuscript notes a previously unappreciated interaction between the geosphere and biosphere by quantifying how landforms created by environmental change alter the physical habitat in a way that some species can take advantage of to benefit their life cycle.

see the justification from the associate editor who is an expert in the domain.

Temperature responses of plant photosynthesis are increasingly crucial under the climatic warming. This paper provides a new parameterization of the temperature response of a core mechanism of plant photosynthesis, photosystem II efficiency, to not only instantaneous but also middle- to long-term temperature variation, so-called acclimation. The authors provided response functions for each plant functional type, allowing researchers to implement them in their land vegetation models with a biochemical photosynthesis scheme. Using the new parameterization would effectively improve the simulation accuracy of plant responses, including tolerance and resilience, to climatic change. This study has implications for studies on plant physiology, remote sensing (SIF), biogeochemistry, and ecosystem/earth system models.

The 2015–2016 Amazon drought, marked by a year-long precipitation shortfall, uniquely impacted rainforest greenness, challenging prior observations. Leveraging water storage, temperature, and moisture demand data analysis, this study elucidates over 70% of the canopy's response, refining our understanding of rainforest resilience and forecasting capabilities under extreme drought scenarios.

This study presents an interesting finding that, when climatic conditions are dry, the direction of soil evaporation from soil to sky can reverse where atmospheric vapor adsorbs downward into the soil. This increased soil moisture input from the atmosphere serves as a non-precipitation water source. The authors show evidence for this process with lysimeters and also demonstrate that this soil adsorption process shows up in commonly used eddy covariance measurements.

This paper describes an extensive Critical Zone Observatory in a unique Patagonian Coastal Rainforest. The authors make a compelling argument for studying the ecological, biogeological, and hydrological value of this Rainforest type and present a comprehensive measurement approach for quantifying water and trace gas fluxes and the environmental drivers to which they respond including disturbance regimes as measured in part by seismology.

This excellent publication uses a multiproxy approach consisting of benthic formaminifera, lipid biomarkers and stable isotopes to study changing redox conditions in the Gulf of Oman during the past 43 kyrs. In large detail, the authors reconstruct periods dominated by either oxygenated conditions or largely oxygen depleted conditions. This high-resolution reconstruction revealed dominantly oxygenated conditions during Marine Isotope Stage 3 with deoxygenation events dominating most of the warmer Dansgaard-Oeschger events.

Arctic greenhouse gas fluxes are key for climate feedback but the Arctic greenhouse gas balance is poorly constrained due to a limited understanding of the spatial variation in these fluxes. This study combines extensive chamber-based flux measurements and remote sensing data to develop a machine-learning model to predict greenhouse gas fluxes across a tundra landscape in Finland. The analysis revealed that the system was a net greenhouse gas sink and showed widespread CH4 uptake in upland vegetation types, almost surpassing the high wetland CH4 emissions at the landscape scale.

Reaching the Paris Agreement targets to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2°C implies not only reducing emissions, but also active carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere. While land-based carbon dioxide removal or negative emission technologies have received most attention, ocean solutions are increasingly being considered. Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), or alkalinization, is one promising ocean-based carbon dioxide technology. However, any new carbon dioxide removal technique needs thorough investigations for its effectiveness, longevity, benefits and lack of disbenefits, financial viability, social acceptance and governability. The paper by Bach is a nice illustration of the type of research that must be done if we are to consider large scale application of OAE. It focuses on the additionality problem of ocean alkalinity enhancement, specifically it investigates how the addition of alkalinity modifies the natural alkalinity cycle and in that way the efficiency of carbon dioxide sequestration.

This is an excellent review of gross primary production (GPP) and net community production (NCP) measurements in the world's oceans using a new fleet of autonomous ocean-going instruments called biogeochemical-Argo (BGC-Argo) floats. The number of BGC-Argo floats has recently been surging with their users, so this review is timely and helpful for many oceanographers and biogeochemists to understand the advantages and challenges in the measurements of GPP and NCP in the oceans with the recently emerged technology.

This important study evaluates the impacts of enhanced olivine weathering on globally relevant phytoplankton species. Results from the study indicate that olivine dissolution products are unlikely to negatively impact the six phytoplankton species tested and may even enhance growth under certain conditions. Studies examining the safety of ocean alkalinity enhancement are urgently needed as interest in deploying this strategy for carbon dioxide removal is increasing.

The findings of this study are interesting to a broader audience as it demonstrates that supposedly biodegradable mulch films used for agricultural purposes remain unchanged in lake sediments over several months. The results indicate that lake sediments are a place of long-term storage rather than a place of degradation for this form of plastic.

This study documents the formation of Fe, Mn and Si amorphous mineral phases by very small cyanobacteria living in oxic, alkaline lakes. This finding has implications for using sedimentary Fe/Mn enrichments as a proxy for redox cycling in the past and extends the documented evidence for biomineralization of Si-rich phases.

Lessmann et al. describes how reservoir flushing could represent a novel way to manage methane emissions from freshwater reservoirs. Novel methods to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are urgently needed as the IPCC recently stated we will need to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere on top of reducing emissions in order to reach important climate goals. This study can help the development of diverse management strategies for mitigating global greenhouse gas emissions.

This study presents element/Ca data collected on Nodosariata, a particular group of foraminifera. The results of this work can potentially expand the applicability of foraminiferal proxies to the Permian, with important implication for the pale oceanographic and modeling communities.

The study covers a relevant contemporary topic (wildfire) and focusses on the recent major European summer of wildfires. The authors demonstrate that the assessment of burned area alone is not enough to fully characterize the impact of fires. Novel methods to assess burned area and above ground biomass losses are described to provide a more informative impact-based characterization of fires.

Nitrite is a nexus in nitrogen turnover, especially in oxygen minimum zones. This study works out new details of its specific role and adds new evidence for anaerobic nitrite oxidation. Furthermore, it shows that nitrogen recycling (nitrate reduction and nitrite oxidation) is quantitatively more important than loss processes.

Marine warming and deoxygenation are projected to intensify and drive a relative decrease in global habitat viability penetrating to all depths with warming dominating at the surface and deoxygenation becomes increasingly important with depth. In a 2°C scenario of global warming, epipelagic species' habitat losses are generally in the order of 0.1-0.5 million km3, while mesopelagic habitat losses are 0.01-0.15 million km3 and demersal losses are in the order of about 0.00025 million km3.

This study is the first to quantify land carbon cycle feedbacks under decreasing atmospheric CO2 concentration following negative CO2 emissions and compare them to feedbacks under positive emissions. The novel approach presented here reduces the carbon cycle inertia in the phase where atmospheric CO2 concentration decreases in order to improve the quantification of carbon cycle feedbacks under negative emissions. This approach reduced the effectivity of negative emissions in reducing atmospheric CO2, due to larger concentration-carbon and climate-carbon feedbacks.

The development of hyperspectral core scanning has facilitated high spatial/temporal pigment reconstructions indicative of changes in bioproductivity and was so far limited to those bacteriochlorophylls derived from Chromatiaceae (purple sulfur bacteria) to reconstruct changes in water column redox conditions and meromixis. This is the first study that reconstructs and quantifies Chlorobi-derived bacteriochlorophylls and its derivatives at high resolution in lake sediments. Therefore, this paper yields more insight into temporal variations of oxygenic and anoxygenic phototrophic communities, and provides a non-destructive tool for more detailed reconstructions of photic zone euxinia in meromictic lakes.

The study by Franz et al. provides exciting new insights into deep biosphere processes during the 'boring billion', indicating that fungi-like eukaryotic organisms developed before 1 Ga and that a deep continental biosphere was already present in the Early Mesoproterozoic/Late Paleoproterozoic.

The paper by Turner and co-authors tackles the very timely question on how well we can reconstruct carbon inventories given the sparse observations. Using an Ensemble Optimal Interpolation approach and synthetic observations, the authors show that a large fraction of ocean carbon and its variability can be reconstructed using temperature and salinity measurements in the top 100 meter, however, reconstruction skill decreases when the top 2000 meters are considered. The authors propose a new way to use sparse observations to better understand historical carbon cycle changes, i.e., an important quantity in light of future changes driven by man-made emissions.

While the source and fate of particulate organic matter (POM) are better understood in riverine, deltaic, and lake systems, this paper provides an insight on POM dynamics in a permafrost catchment, while combining a multiple proxy approach (particulate organic carbon - POC, total suspended matter - TSM, carbon isotopes - d13C and d14C - in POC). Combined with mixing models, these findings help decipher the potential sources for authochtonous and allochtnonous organic matters, and hence provide important insights in the role of permafrost for the organic carbon mobilization in the Arctic region.

Yedema et al. used multiple biomarkers and palynological proxies to track the fate of plant-derived, soil-microibal, fluvial, and marine-produced organic matter in the coastal sediments of the northern Gulf of Mexico. The key findings show plant-derived materials reaching the deepest waters in contrast to fluvial organic matter confined to the proximity of the river mouth. This source-specific difference in the coastal distribution and storage of organic matter can greatly contribute to elucidating the role of terrestrial organic matter in coastal carbon sequestration.

This paper advances our understanding of forest responses to elevated CO2 by considering implications for nutrient availability across the soil profile and the particular role of nutrient recycling in the rhizosphere versus soil organic matter mineralization.

Vast areas of permafrost are being degraded by climate change, which can release substantial quantities of nutrients into rivers and the ocean. This study shows how nitrogen isotopes can be used to determine how climate change affects the fluxes of nitrogen to the Arctic Ocean through permafrost melt.

Schiferl and colleagues combine top-down and bottom-up estimates of carbon dioxide emissions from the North Slope of Alaska to find that CO2 efflux from terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems during the early cold season (September – December) are critical for explaining its carbon balance. Fluxes during the late cold season (January through April) were muted in comparison. Despite the importance of cold-season efflux, growing season CO2 uptake and release processes dominated its interannual variability. This study helps clarify how the carbon cycle of complex tundra ecosystems across large Arctic regions respond to ongoing climate changes.

By using an experimental approach to study how upwelling deep water modulates chemistry and biology response of surface plankton communities the authors address a highly relevant scientific topic as expected climate change will significantly alter ocean currents and upwelling patterns. This is particularly important as stimulation of highly productive phytoplankton blooms by upwelling water are generally attributed to the inputs of water rich in inorganic nutrients into the sunlit surface ocean. By using an experimental approach the authors could disentangle the different drivers of phytoplankton bloom dynamics in the highly productive northern Humboldt Upwelling System. Their results indicate that upwelling modifies phytoplankton succession after upwelling by additional factors and not just the physical supply of inorganic nutrients with the deep water. Accordingly, the most influential drivers were the stoichiometry of the inorganic nutrients added and deep water microbial communities, which can cause heterogeneity in phytoplankton bloom succession and control stoichiometry of residual inorganic nutrients during phytoplankton bloom brake down. Thus, deep water community composition are a major control of phytoplankton bloom dynamics in surface waters following upwelling events which have profound implications for ocean biodiversity, productivity and biochemistry which need to be taken into account in ocean models.

The carbon accumulation rates of the described salt marsh soils are approximately 2-7 times greater than net C uptake rates of Canadian boreal forests, which highlights their potential importance as C reservoirs and the need to consider their C accumulation capacity as a climate mitigation co-benefit when conserving for other salt marsh ecosystem services.

The Arctic is a hot spot of warming triggering methane releases from thawing permafrost. This study by Castro-Morales and Co-Workers provides new insights into the transport of methane from soil to rivers. This work makes an essential contribution to comprehending the magnitude of methane emissions in Arctic rivers and potential contribution to the global methane budget under climate change.

Carbonne et al. identified the concurrent impact of Ocean Acidification as well as ocean warming on larval survivorship of corals. The study focuses on more temperate corals and also demonstrates the impact of lowered ocean pH on larval settlement and growth afterwards. This nicely designed experiment and the conclusive results advance our understanding of human's biogeochemical footprint on important taxa in marine systems.

Accurate constraining the ocean carbon sink is of utmost importance to improve our understanding of the fate of anthropogenic carbon and to better project anthropogenic carbon uptake in the coming decades. This study combines the outcomes of a suite of earth-system models with three well-documented observations (sea surface salinity in the Southern Ocean, strength of Atlantic Overturning and Revelle factor) to reduce bias and uncertainty in the global ocean carbon sink. The results suggest that the ocean carbon sink is about 10% larger than estimated before. This has implications for the global carbon budget.

This study significantly contributes to alleviating the data scarcity of drought legacy effects on ecosystem photosynthesis in temperate deciduous forests with a novel machine learning approach. This is probably the first time that drought legacies on ecosystem carbon fluxes are quantified using eddy-covariance data. The study reported that the reduction in photosynthesis due to drought legacy effects was of comparable magnitude to the concurrent drought effects at the studied sites. This study thus emphasizes the importance of drought legacy effects and provides a novel analytical method to quantify legacy effects elsewhere.