The capacity of northern peatlands for long-term carbon sequestration

Alexandrov, Georgii A.; Brovkin, Victor A.; Kleinen, Thomas; Yu, Zicheng

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-47-2020

Articles | Volume 17, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-47-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-47-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 17, issue 1

Research article

|

03 Jan 2020

Research article |

| 03 Jan 2020

The capacity of northern peatlands for long-term carbon sequestration

Georgii A. Alexandrov, Victor A. Brovkin, Thomas Kleinen, and Zicheng Yu

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Final revised paper (published on 03 Jan 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 20 Mar 2019)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Review of Alexandrov et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 23 May 2019
- AC1: 'Author reply to RC1', Georgii Alexandrov, 18 Jun 2019
RC2: 'Paper is interesting but needs some restructuring and clarity', Anonymous Referee #2, 24 May 2019
- AC2: 'Author reply to RC2', Georgii Alexandrov, 18 Jun 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (05 Aug 2019) by Kirsten Thonicke

Dear Dr. Alexandrov,
first of all, please apologize my late response to your author comments to both reviewers. It was impossible for me to make a decision before the summer break, unfortunately.
Both reviewers recommend major revisions to your manuscript and I will follow their recommendation. However, before producing and submitting the revised manuscript, the author comments need to be revised and specific attention has to be to the following points:
1. In your response letter you should address each review individually. Your response letters, i.e. your author comments, are a mix of both reviews. This way it is impossible to evaluate by me if the requests by the reviewers have been addressed adequately. I think your author comment to reviewer 1 is missing, please provide a separate author response to reviewer 1.
2. You need to address the reviewer concern (reviewer comment 1) described in the general comment on the methods (page C3), results (page C4) and discussion (page C5) very seriously. Please provide an in-depth description in your revised author comment on how you have addressed the description of the methods, the critique on how to present the results and the discussion in your manuscript.
3. Your response to reviewer 2, point 10. (1) P5, L.20-21: Why 1000 PgC? It seems a bit arbitrary to me." Please consider latest estimations on the anthropogenic carbon budget to achieve the 2-degree climate target, which has been refined to 1.5°C. Please refer to the 1.5degree special report and references therein and revise your calculated number for the carbon budget and the references used for justification accordingly.
4. Please check carefully if you have not missed individual comments in your author comment and provide the missing answers. Please note that you have to address each comment individually, therefore it is important to provide point-by-point author comments to each review.

Thank you for providing correct author comments.
Best wishes,
Kirsten Thonicke.

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AR by Georgii Alexandrov on behalf of the Authors (02 Sep 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (10 Sep 2019) by Kirsten Thonicke

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (18 Oct 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Version 2 of the manuscript has been significantly improved by the authors employing reviewers’ comments and suggestions. The introduction and the method sections are easier to understand and highlight objectives of the study as well as limits related to the methodology employed and hypothesis made to estimate the ability of northern peatlands to reduce atmospheric CO2 content in the future. This study fuels the discussion on the interactions of northern peatlands with climate and provide a quantification of one of the interactions which is the incorporation and accumulation of atmospheric CO2 into peatland soil.
Nevertheless, it is a shame that the title does not reflect the whole content and significance of this work. The authors insist on having a reminder in the title of the work by Clymo (1984) “The limits to peat bog growth” in order to highlight the fact that “the cumulative amount of carbon that northern peatlands could remove from the atmosphere is limited by the geomorphological conditions in present climate.” (response to comment 3 of reviewer 1 in point by point reply to all comments document) while the main hypothesis used to compute the estimations is that northern peatland surface area does not significantly change over a period of thousands of years. This hypothesis is fair to take for the present work but it is a strong constrain on the results. Therefore, I think that the authors should propose a title that will be appealing for potential readers and reflex in a more suitable manner the content or the topic of the manuscript. I understand that the authors do not like the word “potential” as suggested by reviewer 1 comment 3 “the potential of northern peatlands for carbon sequestration” fortunately for us the English language is full of words and there are plenty of synonyms for “potential or limits”: ability, capacity, faculty, potency … that could be used here.

Fews minor errors in the text of manuscript version 2:
P5 line1” The use of this approach to addressing uncertainty” choose the either forms “this approach to address” or “this approach addressing”
P7 line 18 “that ocean will not able to remove” it is missing the verb to be, please modify to “that ocean will not be able to remove”

I do regret that there are only so little description and comments on figures and table content. It feels like there are only there as nice illustration where the authors could have talk more about geographical variability from a region to another as suggested by reviewer2 comment28 of the point by point reply to all comments documents. For example, the authors response to reviewer 2 comment 27 is very interesting on the accuracy of both estimates presented in Table 1. I think this could be added to the manuscript into the results section. It shows how interesting is your estimation approach and values, are at lower scale and the variability of the estimate over multiple sites.

Regarding figure 4 and simulation results from CLIMBER-2 Earth system model authors argued to review 1 comment 43 that it “demonstrates the role of northern peatlands in global carbon cycle recovery and calls for further numerical experiments.” In the manuscript model description is summarized in one sentence (supplementary document page 6 first sentence under section S4 Numerical experiments on the CLIMBER-2 ) and simulation set up and conditions are not described. In addition, the goal of the present work is to provide an estimate of the capability of northern peatland to store carbon therefore these simulations are beyond the scope of the paper. Since the authors estimations show an increase in peatland carbon storage in the future, they already demonstrate the role of peatland in the global carbon cycle rather than the simulation results that show that if you add another carbon sink ecosystem that is independent to the first one (the ocean) you do sequester more carbon from the atmosphere which is obvious. And regarding the effect of orbital forcing, in the response to review 1 comment 44, the authors recognized that is beyond the scope of the present study.
Therefore, for all the above reasons, you should remove figure 4 and the final paragraph line 13 to 19 page 7 of the discussion section from the manuscript and S4 from supplementary documentation.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (29 Oct 2019) by Kirsten Thonicke

AR by Georgii Alexandrov on behalf of the Authors (12 Nov 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (25 Nov 2019) by Kirsten Thonicke

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