LAUSR

Plant autotrophic respiration is responsible for the atmospheric release of about half of all photosynthetically fixed carbon and responds to climate change in a manner different from photosynthesis. The plant mass-specific respiration rate ( r A ), a key parameter of the carbon cycle, has not been sufficiently constrained by observations at ecosystem or broader scales. In this study, a meta-analysis revealed a global relationship with vegetation biomass that explains 67–77% of the variance of r A across plant ages and biomes. r A decreased with increasing vegetation biomass such that annual r A was two orders of magnitude larger in fens and deserts than in mature forests. This relationship can be closely approximated by a power-law equation with a universal exponent and yields an estimated global autotrophic respiration rate of 64 ± 12 Pg C yr −1 . This finding, which is phenomenologically and theoretically consistent with metabolic scaling and plant demography, provides a way to constrain the carbon-cycle components of Earth system models.