Overview

This book considers the operation of the terrestrial carbon cycle across a range of spatial and temporal scales, with special emphasis on the photosynthetic carbon metabolism of land plants over the last 400 million years. Chapters 2 and 3 outline some of the fundamental approaches used in attempting to predict the operation of plants in the past from a knowledge of present-day processes, possible means of testing these approaches, and detailed consideration of the nature of the relationship between vegetation, soils and climate in a contemporary climatic setting. The later chapters consider a number of ‘globally-averaged’ responses of plant processes to changes in global mean temperature and atmospheric composition throughout much of the Phanerozoic. In taking this approach, our view has been to open up investigation and discussion of how predictions of geochemical models impinge on the processes governing the regulation of carbon gain and water loss in leaves of plants, following earlier work of this sort (Beerling, 1994).

Consideration of the global view is initiated in Chapter 4 with a detailed discussion of global climate simulations using computers and examining how these simulations can be modified to predict ancient climates. The discussion is then extended to deal with the development of a model representing the various above- and below-ground processes of the terrestrial carbon cycle.