摘要: Over the past several decades, significant progress has been made in measuring and understanding global carbon cycle developing methods for projecting future changes atmospheric CO2 concentration. During this time, a natural starting point was to check balance sheet that accounts all as it exchanged between major reservoirs. While is possible achieve single instant time (for example, year 1980: see Detweiler Hall 1988; Houghton et al. 1987), not with current information fluxes decade-or-longer periods. The inability account exchanges indicates an insufficient knowledge of processes. In chapter, I outline scale discrepancies involved offer hypotheses concerning previously underappreciated suggest new research directions. These postulate vegetation change at scales plausible reason our “balance” over long