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Into the unknown: The role of post-fire soil erosion in the carbon cycle.

Antonio Girona-GarcíaDiana VieiraStefan H DoerrPanos PanagosCristina Santín
Published in: Global change biology (2024)
Wildfires directly emit 2.1 Pg carbon (C) to the atmosphere annually. The net effect of wildfires on the C cycle, however, involves many interacting source and sink processes beyond these emissions from combustion. Among those, the role of post-fire enhanced soil organic carbon (SOC) erosion as a C sink mechanism remains essentially unquantified. Wildfires can greatly enhance soil erosion due to the loss of protective vegetation cover and changes to soil structure and wettability. Post-fire SOC erosion acts as a C sink when off-site burial and stabilization of C eroded after a fire, together with the on-site recovery of SOC content, exceed the C losses during its post-fire transport. Here we synthesize published data on post-fire SOC erosion and evaluate its overall potential to act as longer-term C sink. To explore its quantitative importance, we also model its magnitude at continental scale using the 2017 wildfire season in Europe. Our estimations show that the C sink ability of SOC water erosion during the first post-fire year could account for around 13% of the C emissions produced by wildland fires. This indicates that post-fire SOC erosion is a quantitatively important process in the overall C balance of fires and highlights the need for more field data to further validate this initial assessment.
Keyphrases
  • climate change
  • preterm infants
  • risk assessment
  • mass spectrometry
  • heavy metals
  • human health
  • particulate matter
  • deep learning
  • gestational age
  • plant growth
  • municipal solid waste