date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 16:32:06 UT from: j.mossinger@nature.com subject: Nature Review Request - manuscript 2004-02-15482 to: K.Briffa@uea.ac.uk Dear Dr. Briffa I am writing in the hope that you may be able to provide some advice on a short manuscript submitted to Nature. The manuscript comes from Andrei Lapenis, Anatoly Shvidenko, Dmitry Shepashenko and is entitled "Disproportional allocation of carbon to green parts in the Russian forest from 1960 to 2000". Its first paragraph is pasted below. Is this a paper you would be willing to review (hopefully within about two weeks of receiving it)? Should you be unable to review the manuscript for any reason, it would be helpful to us if you could suggest alternative referees. If you need any further information, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you in advance for your help and I look forward to hearing from you soon. Yours sincerely, Juliane Mossinger ****************************** Dr Juliane C. Mossinger Associate Editor - The Macmillan Building, 4-6 Crinan Street, London N1 9XW, UK Tel +44 (0)207 833 4000; Fax +44 (0)207 843 4596; nature@nature.com - 968 National Press Building, 529 14th Street NW, Washington DC 20045, USA Tel +1 202 737 2355; Fax +1 202 628 1609; nature@naturedc.com - 225 Bush Street, Suite 1453, San Francisco CA 94104, USA Tel +1 415 403 9027; Fax +1 415 781 3805; nature@naturesf.com - *Nature's author and policy information sites are at www.nature.com/nature/submit/. Nature's publisher, Nature Publishing Group, does not retain authors' copyright. Authors grant NPG an exclusive licence, in return for which they can reuse their papers in their future printed work. An author can post a copy of the published paper on his or her own not-for-profit website. ****************************** Disproportional allocation of carbon to green parts in the Russian forest from 1960 to 2000 Andrei Lapenis, Anatoly Shvidenko, Dmitry Shepashenko Over the last four decades global changes in climate have eased several critical constraints for boreal forest growth, thus allowing for an increase in the net primary production1 and accumulation of carbon in the growing stock2,3. It is not known, however, how this carbon sink was distributed among the various fractions of live forest biomass. Here we have employed the most complete dataset for the Russian forest on measurements of tree fractions at 3507 sample plots, and have derived 1960-2000 trends in live biomass fractions of green parts, stem wood as well as roots. Our calculations show an increase in the allocation of carbon to green parts at the expense of stem wood and roots. The increase of leaf to stem wood ratio resolves a paradox between the reduced sensitivity of tree rings to climate change4 and satellite data, which demonstrate increased greening of the Northern Hemisphere5. More importantly, our results explain the bias between ground- and satellite-based estimates of carbon sink in the Russian forest. Please note that your contact details are being held on our editorial database which is used only for this journal's management of the peer review process. If you would prefer us not to contact you in the future please let us know by emailing nature@nature.com.