Making The Paper

摘要

Not all of the carbon dioxide emitted into Earths atmosphere remains there. So where does it go? Some is taken up by the oceans, but the destination of a considerable amount remains uncertain, and has been labelled the 'missing carbon sink'. Tree-monitoring projects in ten African countries weren't set up to tackle this problem, but because their measurements were consistent Simon Lewis and his colleagues were able to pool the data and use them to address the question of where the missing carbon might be. Their estimates, along with those made in other tropical regions, indicate that intact tropical forests remove enough CO_2 from the atmosphere to account for about half of the missing sink.rnLewis, an ecologist at the University of Leeds, UK, and his team used data collected over various time frames during the past 40 years on 79 inventory plots in west, central and east Africa. Within each plot, local forest managers and scientists had tagged all of the trees that were at least 10 centimetres in diameter and had recorded those trees' diameter, location and species.