TY - JOUR T1 - Revisiting the role of nutrient availability on global forest carbon balance JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/012476 SP - 012476 AU - Enzai Du Y1 - 2014/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/12/28/012476.abstract N2 - Global forests dominate the capacity of carbon (C) sequestration in terrestrial ecosystems and have strong feedbacks to changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and climate factors. The role of nutrient availability is becoming crucial with growing evidence that it can regulate the response of ecosystem C sequestration to increased CO2 concentrations, elevated temperature and changed water availability (Oren et al., 2001; Wamelink et al., 2009). Fernández-Martínez et al. (2014) recently concluded that nutrient availability was the chief determinant of net ecosystem production (NEP) and ecosystem carbon-use efficiency (CUEe, the ratio of NEP to gross primary production, (GPP)) in global forests.However, De Vries (2014) seriously concerned that their analysis of global observational datasets can be subject to bias due to the inclusion of outliers (three very young nutrient-rich forests with extremely high NEPs) and assumed linearity in relationships. Using the same datasets retrieved by digitalizing figures from Fernández-Martínez et al. (2014), here I have performed statistical analysis regarding the concerns of De Vries (2014) and found that nutrient-rich and nutrient-poor forests have no difference in their allocation of GPP to NEP and ecosystems respiration (Re). ER -