Atmospheric CO₂ and Plant Productivity

This project, located at the USDA/ARS facility in Temple, TX, is the first field project to provide a continuous gradient of atmospheric CO2. The grassland system has been operating since the spring of 1997, manipulating CO2 concentrations from 200 to 550 ppm (concentrations found at the end of the last ice age to those reached sometime next century). Funding for the research comes from the USDA/ARS (the global change group of Polley, Johnson, and Torbert), the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station (Dugas), and NIGEC/DOE (Jackson).

More photos of the project:

Publications from the Temple "tunnel" project:

• Gill, RA, HW Polley, HB Johnson, LJ Anderson, H Maherali, RB Jackson. 2002. Nonlinear grassland responses to past and future atmospheric CO2. Nature 417:279-282.
• Maherali, H, CD Reid, HW Polley, HB Johnson, RB Jackson. 2002. Stomatal acclimation over a subambient to elevated CO2 gradient in a C3/C4 grassland. Plant, Cell and Environment 25:557-566.
• Anderson, LJ, H Maherali, HB Johnson, HW Polley, and RB Jackson. 2001. Gas exchange and photosynthetic acclimation from subambient to elevated CO2 in a C3-C4 grassland. Global Change Biology 7:693-707.

Posters and Presentations:

• ESA 2001 poster: Effects of a 4-year exposure to pre-industrial and elevated CO2 gradient on stomatal characters of C3 and C4 species
• ESA 2000 presentation: Photosynthetic and stomatal responses to sub-ambient and elevated CO2 concentrations in a C3-C4 grassland
• AGU 2000 poster: Soil Responses to Atmospheric CO2: Storage and Fluxes of Carbon and Nitrogen in a Grassland Exposed to a Gradient in CO2 Concentration

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Last modified 23 May 2002