Wildlife and open-canopy ecosystems like grasslands are rarely a part of discussions surrounding climate change mitigation.
The idea that herbivores are necessarily bad for carbon storage because they consume and disturb vegetation is “far too simplistic and risks poor land management decisions with bad consequences for biodiversity,” said Jeppe A.
By increasing the amount of carbon cycled through the soil, Kristensen and his coauthors argued, ecosystems with large herbivores may store a larger fraction of total ecosystem carbon in pools less vulnerable to perturbations than living plant biomass.
The paper presents a holistic framework of linkages between vegetation, large herbivores like elephants and wild boars, smaller organisms like earthworms and dung beetles, and microbes.
But soil carbon is an important aspect, and herbivores improve soil carbon and nitrogen sequestration,” said Judith Sitters, a researcher in forest and landscape ecology at Wageningen University and Research who did not contribute to the new paper.