Increasing wildfires threaten historic carbon sink of boreal forest soils

Xanthe J. Walker (), Jennifer L. Baltzer, Steven G. Cumming, Nicola J. Day, Christopher Ebert, Scott Goetz, Jill F. Johnstone, Stefano Potter, Brendan M. Rogers, Edward A. G. Schuur, Merritt R. Turetsky and Michelle C. Mack
Additional contact information
Xanthe J. Walker: Northern Arizona University
Jennifer L. Baltzer: Wilfrid Laurier University
Steven G. Cumming: Laval University
Nicola J. Day: Wilfrid Laurier University
Christopher Ebert: Northern Arizona University
Scott Goetz: Northern Arizona University
Jill F. Johnstone: University of Saskatchewan
Stefano Potter: Woods Hole Research Center
Brendan M. Rogers: Woods Hole Research Center
Edward A. G. Schuur: Northern Arizona University
Merritt R. Turetsky: University of Guelph
Michelle C. Mack: Northern Arizona University

Nature, 2019, vol. 572, issue 7770, 520-523

Abstract: Abstract Boreal forest fires emit large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere primarily through the combustion of soil organic matter1–3. During each fire, a portion of this soil beneath the burned layer can escape combustion, leading to a net accumulation of carbon in forests over multiple fire events4. Climate warming and drying has led to more severe and frequent forest fires5–7, which threaten to shift the carbon balance of the boreal ecosystem from net accumulation to net loss1, resulting in a positive climate feedback8. This feedback will occur if organic-soil carbon that escaped burning in previous fires, termed ‘legacy carbon’, combusts. Here we use soil radiocarbon dating to quantitatively assess legacy carbon loss in the 2014 wildfires in the Northwest Territories of Canada2. We found no evidence for the combustion of legacy carbon in forests that were older than the historic fire-return interval of northwestern boreal forests9. In forests that were in dry landscapes and less than 60 years old at the time of the fire, legacy carbon that had escaped burning in the previous fire cycle was combusted. We estimate that 0.34 million hectares of young forests (

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1474-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:572:y:2019:i:7770:d:10.1038_s41586-019-1474-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1474-y

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().