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Abstract. Large-scale reforestation, afforestation, and forest restoration schemes have gained global support as climate change mitigation strategies due to their significant carbon dioxide removal (CDR) potential. However, there has been limited research into the unintended consequences of forestation from a biophysical perspective. In the Community Earth System Model version 2 (CESM2), we apply a global forestation scenario, within a Paris Agreement-compatible warming scenario, to investigate the land surface and hydroclimate response. Compared to a control scenario where land use is fixed to present-day levels, the forestation scenario is up to 2 °C cooler at low latitudes by 2100, driven by a 10 % increase in evaporative cooling in forested areas. However, afforested areas where grassland or shrubland are replaced lead to a doubling of plant water demand in some tropical regions, causing significant decreases in soil moisture (∼ 5 % globally, 5 %–10 % regionally) and water availability (∼ 10 % globally, 10 %–15 % regionally) in regions with increased forest cover. While there are some increases in low cloud and seasonal precipitation over the expanded tropical forests, with enhanced negative cloud radiative forcing, the impacts on large-scale precipitation and atmospheric circulation are limited. This contrasts with the precipitation response to simulated large-scale deforestation found in previous studies. The forestation scenario demonstrates local cooling benefits without major disruption to global hydrodynamics beyond those already projected to result from climate change, in addition to the cooling associated with CDR. However, the water demands of extensive forestation, especially afforestation, have implications for its viability, given the uncertainty in future precipitation changes. 

Forestation is widely proposed for carbon dioxide (CO₂) removal, but its impact on climate through changes to atmospheric composition and surface albedo remains relatively unexplored. We assessed these responses using two Earth system models by comparing a scenario with extensive global forest expansion in suitable regions to other plausible futures. We found that forestation increased aerosol scattering and the greenhouse gases methane and ozone following increased biogenic organic emissions. Additionally, forestation decreased surface albedo, which yielded a positive radiative forcing (i.e., warming). This offset up to a third of the negative forcing from the additional CO₂removal under a 4°C warming scenario. However, when forestation was pursued alongside other strategies that achieve the 2°C Paris Agreement target, the offsetting positive forcing was smaller, highlighting the urgency for simultaneous emission reductions. 

This paper describes the development of services and tools for scaling data curation services at the Qualitative Data Repository (QDR). Through a set of open-source tools, semi-automated workflows, and extensions to the Dataverse platform, our team has built services for curators to efficiently and effectively publish collections of qualitatively derived data. The contributions we seek to make in this paper are as follows: 1. We describe ‘human-in-the-loop’ curation and the tools that facilitate this model at QDR; 2. We provide an in-depth discussion of the design and implementation of these tools, including applications specific to the Dataverse software repository, as well as standalone archiving tools written in R; and 3. We highlight the role of providing a service layer for data discovery and accessibility of qualitative data.