Contribution of nitrogen deposition to global forest carbon sequestration

Human activities have drastically increased inputs of reactive nitrogen globally. Increased deposition of N onto forests may alleviate N limitation and thereby stimulated productivity and carbon (C) sequestration in forest aboveground woody biomass (AGWB), a stable C pool with long turn-over times. The associated reduction in atmospheric CO2 concentrations use represents a cooling effect of human N use that may partly offsets the warming effect of human-induced N2O emissions. The accompanying datasets give information on global spatial variation in the contribution of atmospherically deposited nitrogen (N) to carbon (C) sequestration in forest aboveground woody biomass, as well as the net climatic footprint of human N use resulting from the warming effect of N-induced direct and indirect N2O emissions on the one hand, and the cooling effect of N-induced C sequestration in forest aboveground woody biomass on the other.