carbon

Restoring a low-intensity, frequent-fire regime in fire-prone forests offers a promising natural climate solution. Management interventions that include prescribed fire and/or mechanical treatments have effectively reduced fire hazards in the Western United States, yet concerns remain regarding their impact on forest carbon storage.

Changing climate is altering the amount of carbon that can be sustained in forest ecosystems. Increasing heat and drought is already causing increased mortality and decreased regeneration in some locations. These changes have implications for landscape carbon storage with ongoing climate change.

Background

Background

Pathways to achieving net-zero and net-negative greenhouse-gas (GHG) emission targets rely on land-based contributions to carbon (C) sequestration. However, projections of future contributions neglect to consider ecosystems, climate change, legacy impacts of continental-scale fire exclusion, forest accretion and densification, and a century or more of management.

Wildfires can dramatically alter water quality, resulting in severe implications for human and freshwater systems. However, regional-scale assessments of these impacts are often limited by data scarcity. Here, we unify observations from 1984–2021 in 245 burned watersheds across the western United States, comparing post-fire signals to baseline levels from 293 unburned basins.

Background: Forest ecosystems function as the largest terrestrial carbon sink globally. In the Western US, fires play a crucial role in modifying forest carbon storage, sequestration capacity, and the transfer of carbon from live to dead carbon pools.

Introduction: Growing concerns about fire across the western United States, and commensurate emphasis on treating expansive areas over the next 2 decades, have created a need to develop tools for managers to assess management benefits and impacts across spatial scales.

Background: Wildfires can significantly impact water quality and supply. However logistical difficulties and high variability in in situ data collection have limited previous analyses.

Aims: We simulated wildfire and rainfall effects at varying terrain slopes in a controlled setting to isolate driver-response relationships.

In this review, we discuss current research on forest carbon risk from natural disturbance under climate change for the United States, with emphasis on advancements in analytical mapping and modeling tools that have potential to drive research for managing future long-term stability of forest carbon.