scholarly journals Partitioning carbon losses from fire combustion in a montane Valley, Alberta Canada

2021 ◽  
Vol 496 ◽  
pp. 119435
Author(s):  
S. Gerrand ◽  
J. Aspinall ◽  
T. Jensen ◽  
C. Hopkinson ◽  
A. Collingwood ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 880
Author(s):  
Andrey Sirin ◽  
Alexander Maslov ◽  
Dmitry Makarov ◽  
Yakov Gulbe ◽  
Hans Joosten

Forest-peat fires are notable for their difficulty in estimating carbon losses. Combined carbon losses from tree biomass and peat soil were estimated at an 8 ha forest-peat fire in the Moscow region after catastrophic fires in 2010. The loss of tree biomass carbon was assessed by reconstructing forest stand structure using the classification of pre-fire high-resolution satellite imagery and after-fire ground survey of the same forest classes in adjacent areas. Soil carbon loss was assessed by using the root collars of stumps to reconstruct the pre-fire soil surface and interpolating the peat characteristics of adjacent non-burned areas. The mean (median) depth of peat losses across the burned area was 15 ± 8 (14) cm, varying from 13 ± 5 (11) to 20 ± 9 (19). Loss of soil carbon was 9.22 ± 3.75–11.0 ± 4.96 (mean) and 8.0–11.0 kg m−2 (median); values exceeding 100 tC ha−1 have also been found in other studies. The estimated soil carbon loss for the entire burned area, 98 (mean) and 92 (median) tC ha−1, significantly exceeds the carbon loss from live (tree) biomass, which averaged 58.8 tC ha−1. The loss of carbon in the forest-peat fire thus equals the release of nearly 400 (soil) and, including the biomass, almost 650 tCO2 ha−1 into the atmosphere, which illustrates the underestimated impact of boreal forest-peat fires on atmospheric gas concentrations and climate.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 1441
Author(s):  
Jin Han Park ◽  
Jianbang Gan ◽  
Chan Park

The net primary productivity (NPP) of a forest is an important indicator of its potential for the provision of ecosystem services such as timber, carbon, and biodiversity. However, accurately and consistently quantifying global forest NPP remains a challenge in practice. We converted carbon stock changes using the Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) data and carbon losses associated with disturbances and timber removals into an NPP equivalent measurement (FRA NPP*) and compared it with the NPP derived from the MODIS satellite data (MOD17 NPP) for the world’s forests. We found statistically significant differences between the two NPP estimates, with the FRA NPP* being lower than the MOD17 NPP; the differences were correlated with forest cover, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and GDP per capita in countries, and may also stem from the NPP estimation methods and scopes. While the former explicitly accounts for carbon losses associated with timber removals and disturbances, the latter better reflects the principles of photosynthesis. The discrepancies between the two NPP estimates increase in countries with a low income or low forest cover, calling for enhancing their forest resource assessment capacity. By identifying the discrepancies and underlying factors, we also provide new insights into the relationships between the MOD17 NPP and global forest carbon stock estimates, motivating and guiding future research to improve the robustness of quantifying global forest NPP and carbon sequestration potential.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Rosinger ◽  
Michael Bonkowski

AbstractFreeze–thaw (FT) events exert a great physiological stress on the soil microbial community and thus significantly impact soil biogeochemical processes. Studies often show ambiguous and contradicting results, because a multitude of environmental factors affect biogeochemical responses to FT. Thus, a better understanding of the factors driving and regulating microbial responses to FT events is required. Soil chronosequences allow more focused comparisons among soils with initially similar start conditions. We therefore exposed four soils with contrasting organic carbon contents and opposing soil age (i.e., years after restoration) from a postmining agricultural chronosequence to three consecutive FT events and evaluated soil biochgeoemical responses after thawing. The major microbial biomass carbon losses occurred after the first FT event, while microbial biomass N decreased more steadily with subsequent FT cycles. This led to an immediate and lasting decoupling of microbial biomass carbon:nitrogen stoichiometry. After the first FT event, basal respiration and the metabolic quotient (i.e., respiration per microbial biomass unit) were above pre-freezing values and thereafter decreased with subsequent FT cycles, demonstrating initially high dissimilatory carbon losses and less and less microbial metabolic activity with each iterative FT cycle. As a consequence, dissolved organic carbon and total dissolved nitrogen increased in soil solution after the first FT event, while a substantial part of the liberated nitrogen was likely lost through gaseous emissions. Overall, high-carbon soils were more vulnerable to microbial biomass losses than low-carbon soils. Surprisingly, soil age explained more variation in soil chemical and microbial responses than soil organic carbon content. Further studies are needed to dissect the factors associated with soil age and its influence on soil biochemical responses to FT events.


Forests ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Bruno L. De Faria ◽  
Gina Marano ◽  
Camille Piponiot ◽  
Carlos A. Silva ◽  
Vinícius de L. Dantas ◽  
...  

In recent decades, droughts, deforestation and wildfires have become recurring phenomena that have heavily affected both human activities and natural ecosystems in Amazonia. The time needed for an ecosystem to recover from carbon losses is a crucial metric to evaluate disturbance impacts on forests. However, little is known about the impacts of these disturbances, alone and synergistically, on forest recovery time and the resulting spatiotemporal patterns at the regional scale. In this study, we combined the 3-PG forest growth model, remote sensing and field derived equations, to map the Amazonia-wide (3 km of spatial resolution) impact and recovery time of aboveground biomass (AGB) after drought, fire and a combination of logging and fire. Our results indicate that AGB decreases by 4%, 19% and 46% in forests affected by drought, fire and logging + fire, respectively, with an average AGB recovery time of 27 years for drought, 44 years for burned and 63 years for logged + burned areas and with maximum values reaching 184 years in areas of high fire intensity. Our findings provide two major insights in the spatial and temporal patterns of drought and wildfire in the Amazon: (1) the recovery time of the forests takes longer in the southeastern part of the basin, and, (2) as droughts and wildfires become more frequent—since the intervals between the disturbances are getting shorter than the rate of forest regeneration—the long lasting damage they cause potentially results in a permanent and increasing carbon losses from these fragile ecosystems.


2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 2153-2163 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Guenet ◽  
F. E. Moyano ◽  
N. Vuichard ◽  
G. J. D. Kirk ◽  
P. H. Bellamy ◽  
...  

Abstract. A widespread decrease of the topsoil carbon content was observed over England and Wales during the period 1978–2003 in the National Soil Inventory (NSI), amounting to a carbon loss of 4.44 Tg yr−1 over 141 550 km2. Subsequent modelling studies have shown that changes in temperature and precipitation could only account for a small part of the observed decrease, and therefore that changes in land use and management and resulting changes in heterotrophic respiration or net primary productivity were the main causes. So far, all the models used to reproduce the NSI data have not accounted for plant–soil interactions and have only been soil carbon models with carbon inputs forced by data. Here, we use three different versions of a process-based coupled soil–vegetation model called ORCHIDEE (Organizing Carbon and Hydrology in Dynamic Ecosystems), in order to separate the effect of trends in soil carbon input from soil carbon mineralization induced by climate trends over 1978–2003. The first version of the model (ORCHIDEE-AR5), used for IPCC-AR5 CMIP5 Earth System simulations, is based on three soil carbon pools defined with first-order decomposition kinetics, as in the CENTURY model. The second version (ORCHIDEE-AR5-PRIM) built for this study includes a relationship between litter carbon and decomposition rates, to reproduce a priming effect on decomposition. The last version (O-CN) takes into account N-related processes. Soil carbon decomposition in O-CN is based on CENTURY, but adds N limitations on litter decomposition. We performed regional gridded simulations with these three versions of the ORCHIDEE model over England and Wales. None of the three model versions was able to reproduce the observed NSI soil carbon trend. This suggests either that climate change is not the main driver for observed soil carbon losses or that the ORCHIDEE model even with priming or N effects on decomposition lacks the basic mechanisms to explain soil carbon change in response to climate, which would raise a caution flag about the ability of this type of model to project soil carbon changes in response to future warming. A third possible explanation could be that the NSI measurements made on the topsoil are not representative of the total soil carbon losses integrated over the entire soil depth, and thus cannot be compared with the model output.


2009 ◽  
Vol 102 (3) ◽  
pp. 142-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca J. Trueman ◽  
Lina Taneva ◽  
Miquel A. Gonzalez-Meler ◽  
Walter C. Oechel ◽  
Hormoz BassiriRad

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (18) ◽  
pp. 5199-5213 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Maestrini ◽  
S. Abiven ◽  
N. Singh ◽  
J. Bird ◽  
M. S. Torn ◽  
...  

Abstract. Pyrogenic organic matter (PyOM) plays an important role as a stable carbon (C) sink in the soils of terrestrial ecosystems. However, uncertainties remain about in situ turnover rates of fire-derived PyOM in soil, the main processes leading to PyOM-C and nitrogen (N) losses from the soil, and the role of N availability on PyOM cycling in soils. We measured PyOM and native soil organic carbon losses from the soil as carbon dioxide and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) using additions of highly 13C-labelled PyOM (2.03 atom %) and its precursor pinewood during 1 year in a temperate forest soil. The field experiment was carried out under ambient and increased mineral N deposition (+60 kg N-NH4NO3 ha−1 year−1). The results showed that after 1 year: (1) 0.5% of PyOM-C and 22% of wood-C were mineralized as CO2, leading to an estimated turnover time of 191 and 4 years, respectively; (2) the quantity of PyOM and wood lost as dissolved organic carbon was negligible (0.0004 ± 0.0003% and 0.022 ± 0.007% of applied-C, respectively); and (3) N additions decreased cumulative PyOM mineralization by 43%, but did not affect cumulative wood mineralization and did not affect the loss of DOC from PyOM or wood. We conclude that mineralization to CO2 was the main process leading to PyOM losses during the first year of mineralization in a forest soil, and that N addition can decrease PyOM-C cycling, while added N showed no effect on wood C cycling.


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