Global Biogeochemical Cycles

Global Biogeochemical Cycles (global-biogeochemical-cycles)

Journal positioning

Global Biogeochemical Cycles (GBC) is the American Geophysical Union's journal for the cycling of carbon, nutrients, and elements through the earth system: the fluxes, budgets, and feedbacks that move and transform elements across land, ocean, and atmosphere, constrained by observations, experiments, and models. The defining expectation is a quantitative, system-scale advance in biogeochemistry — a better-constrained flux or budget, a newly characterized feedback, or a mechanism operating at regional-to-global scale — not a site-level process measurement of interest mainly to one community. A descriptive local incubation, a single-station time series, or an ecological/soil study with no implication for an element budget or earth-system feedback is a weak fit. This skill is a fit / venue-selection / re-framing tool. It does not replace the journal's current author guidance. Before submitting, re-check the live GBC / AGU author instructions and data policy.

When to trigger

• The author names GBC and wants a fit/framing check for a biogeochemical-cycling, flux/budget, or feedback paper.
• A local flux measurement or experiment must be re-framed into a system-scale budget, feedback, or generalizable biogeochemical mechanism.
• The author is choosing between GBC, soil-biology-and-biochemistry (soil-process mechanism), and water-resources-research (water science).
• The author needs GBC's quantitative system-scale bar and AGU FAIR data-deposition expectations.

Scope & topic fit

• Carbon cycle: land and ocean carbon uptake, storage, and exchange; atmospheric CO2/CH4 budgets and their drivers.
• Nutrient and element cycles: nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, silicon, sulfur, and trace elements, and their coupling to carbon.
• Land–atmosphere and ocean–atmosphere biogeochemical exchange, including greenhouse-gas and reactive-gas fluxes.
• Marine biogeochemistry: productivity, export, remineralization, and ocean biogeochemical–physical coupling.
• Terrestrial biogeochemistry: soils, vegetation, wetlands, and disturbance effects on element budgets at landscape-to-global scale.
• Biogeochemical feedbacks with climate and the human perturbation of global element cycles, from data and earth-system/biogeochemical models.

Method & evidence bar

• The contribution must be quantitative and system-scale: a flux, budget, or feedback that generalizes beyond one site or sample.
• Budgets and fluxes require explicit uncertainty, closure assessment where applicable, and reconciliation of bottom-up and top-down constraints when both exist.
• Models must be evaluated against observations with skill metrics and benchmarks; parameter and structural uncertainty should be addressed, not ignored.
• Observational and experimental work needs defensible scaling from measurement to system level, with error propagation through the scaling.
• Mechanistic and feedback claims need evidence linking the proposed process to the budget or signal, not correlation alone.
• Data and code underpinning fluxes, budgets, and model results should be deposited in a FAIR community repository with a DOI per AGU policy.

Structure & house style

• AGU article format; GBC publishes research articles and commentaries — re-check current article types and length expectations on the live guide.
• The introduction must state the biogeochemical-cycling gap and the system-scale contribution, not just describe a site or dataset.
• A key-points summary is part of the AGU format; figures should be quantitative and load-bearing (flux/budget diagrams, maps with uncertainty, model–data comparisons).
• Methods and a data/software-availability statement must let a reader reproduce the central budget or flux estimate; AGU expects open data/code with persistent identifiers.
• Reported quantities should use established biogeochemical units and conventions so budgets are comparable across studies.