New Study Shows Vegetation Controls the Future of the Water Cycle

“Plants are really the thermostat of the world,” says Léo Lemordant, Gentine’s PhD student and lead author of the paper. “They’re at the center of the water, energy, and carbon cycles. As they take up carbon from the atmosphere to thrive, they release water that they take from the soils. Doing that, they also cool off the surface, controlling the temperature that we all feel. Now we know that mainly plants—not simply precipitation or temperature—will tell us whether we will live in a drier or wetter world.”

Their study“Critical impact of vegetation physiology on the continental hydrologic cycle in response to increasing CO₂.”is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Authors are: Léo Lemordant (Columbia Engineering); Pierre Gentine (Columbia Engineering and Earth Institute); Abigail Swann (University of Washington); Benjamin I. Cook (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University); and Jacob Scheff (University of North Carolina, Charlotte).