“Our study provides scientists from a variety of domains a global context with which to interpret their results.”

We used data and methods from atmospheric chemistry, climatology, global ecology, and satellite remote sensing to provide a globally comprehensive view of the biosphere over the past two decades. The multidisciplinary nature of our study has something to offer everyone involved in global change research, whether it is the Kyoto protocol or changes in biodiversity.

Rather than a discovery, our study provides a conceptual framework of climate-limiting factors to plant growth for interpreting climate-induced changes in global vegetation. Often global change studies focus on a specific geographic region, a particular organism or the impact of a given climatic factor, like temperature. Our study provides scientists from a variety of domains a global context with which to interpret their results.

Over the past two decades, global climatic changes have not been uniform. However, many of these changes were beneficial to plant growth. Overall, plants grew 6% better in 1999 when compared with 1982. In regions where temperature limited plant growth it became warmer, water-limited regions became wetter and where sunlight was in short supply (frequent cloud cover) it increased.

I was fortunate to be working with a number of leaders in many scientific disciplines over the last decade: Dr. Charles Keeling (global CO2 observations), Dr. Compton Tucker (satellite remote sensing), Dr. Steve Running (global ecology) and Dr. Ranga Myneni (climate-vegetation interactions). They helped mature and articulate the arguments in our paper, which is the latest in a series of papers published since the late 1990s.