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Journal ArticleDOI

Fire suppression and ecosystem carbon storage

01 Oct 2000-Ecology (Ecological Society of America)-Vol. 81, Iss: 10, pp 2680-2685
TL;DR: A 35-year controlled burning experiment in Minnesota oak savanna showed that fire frequency had a great impact on ecosystem carbon (C) stores, with most carbon stored in woody biomass.
Abstract: A 35-year controlled burning experiment in Minnesota oak savanna showed that fire frequency had a great impact on ecosystem carbon (C) stores. Specifically, compared to the historical fire regime, fire suppression led to an average of 1.8 Mg·ha−1·yr−1 of C storage, with most carbon stored in woody biomass. Forest floor carbon stores were also significantly impacted by fire frequency, but there were no detectable effects of fire suppression on carbon in soil and fine roots combined, or in woody debris. Total ecosystem C stores averaged ∼110 Mg/ha in stands experiencing presettlement fire frequencies, but ∼220 Mg/ha in stands experiencing fire suppression. If comparable rates of C storage were to occur in other ecosystems in response to the current extent of fire suppression in the United States, fire suppression in the USA might account for 8–20% of missing global carbon.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the western United States, a key cause of carbon sequestration is fire suppression, which sets the stage for the catastrophic losses that are occurring during fire season 2002 as mentioned in this paper, and increases in fire due to the effects of fire suppression and prescribed burning and thinning could significantly affect the national carbon budget.
Abstract: The U.S. carbon budget has been the focus of recent scientific debate [Fan et al., 1998; Pacala et al., 2001; Gurney et al., 2002] Even conservative estimates suggest that U.S. ecosystems take up a significant amount of carbon, largely as a result of historical land use practices [Houghton et al., 1999; Schimel et al.,2000; Pacala et al., 2001]. In the western United States, a key cause of carbon sequestration is fire suppression. Fire suppression, of course, also sets the stage for the catastrophic losses that are occurring during fire season 2002. Increases in fire due to the effects of fire suppression, increased prescribed burning and thinning, and climate change could significantly affect the national carbon budget. At the continental scale, a comprehensive research approach—the North American Carbon Program (NACP)—is planned to quantify carbon exchange and improve our understanding of the contributing processes [Wofsy and Harriss, 2002].

121 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Abstract: In many of the world's drylands, human-induced alteration of grazing and fire regimes over the past century has promoted the replacement of grasses by woody vegetation. Here, we evaluate the magnitude of changes in plant and soil carbon and nitrogen pools in a subtropical landscape undergoing succession from grassland to thorn woodland in southern Texas. Our approach involved linking a process-based ecosystem model to a transition matrix model. Grass and forest production submodels of CENTURY were parameterized with field data collected from herbaceous and wooded landscape elements broadly representative of habitats in global savanna systems. The Markov (transition matrix) model simulated the displacement of grassland communities under land use practices typical of many modern grasslands and savannas (heavy livestock grazing; no fire) and climate events. The modeled landscape was initialized for pre-Anglo-European settlement grassland conditions and then subjected to heavy, continuous livestock grazing an...

118 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a high-resolution inversion based upon a regional meteorology model (RAMS) and an underlying biosphere (SiB3) model, both running on an identical 40 km grid over most of North America.
Abstract: . Resolving the discrepancies between NEE estimates based upon (1) ground studies and (2) atmospheric inversion results, demands increasingly sophisticated techniques. In this paper we present a high-resolution inversion based upon a regional meteorology model (RAMS) and an underlying biosphere (SiB3) model, both running on an identical 40 km grid over most of North America. Current operational systems like CarbonTracker as well as many previous global inversions including the Transcom suite of inversions have utilized inversion regions formed by collapsing biome-similar grid cells into larger aggregated regions. An extreme example of this might be where corrections to NEE imposed on forested regions on the east coast of the United States might be the same as that imposed on forests on the west coast of the United States while, in reality, there likely exist subtle differences in the two areas, both natural and anthropogenic. Our current inversion framework utilizes a combination of previously employed inversion techniques while allowing carbon flux corrections to be biome independent. Temporally and spatially high-resolution results utilizing biome-independent corrections provide insight into carbon dynamics in North America. In particular, we analyze hourly CO2 mixing ratio data from a sparse network of eight towers in North America for 2004. A prior estimate of carbon fluxes due to Gross Primary Productivity (GPP) and Ecosystem Respiration (ER) is constructed from the SiB3 biosphere model on a 40 km grid. A combination of transport from the RAMS and the Parameterized Chemical Transport Model (PCTM) models is used to forge a connection between upwind biosphere fluxes and downwind observed CO2 mixing ratio data. A Kalman filter procedure is used to estimate weekly corrections to biosphere fluxes based upon observed CO2. RMSE-weighted annual NEE estimates, over an ensemble of potential inversion parameter sets, show a mean estimate 0.57 Pg/yr sink in North America. We perform the inversion with two independently derived boundary inflow conditions and calculate jackknife-based statistics to test the robustness of the model results. We then compare final results to estimates obtained from the CarbonTracker inversion system and at the Southern Great Plains flux site. Results are promising, showing the ability to correct carbon fluxes from the biosphere models over annual and seasonal time scales, as well as over the different GPP and ER components. Additionally, the correlation of an estimated sink of carbon in the South Central United States with regional anomalously high precipitation in an area of managed agricultural and forest lands provides interesting hypotheses for future work.

109 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, mass balance calculations were used to quantify the effects of diversity, CO2, and N on both the total amount of C allocated belowground by plants (total belowground C allocation, TBCA) and ecosystem C storage in a periodically burned, 8-year Minnesota grassland biodiversity, CO 2, and nitrogen (N) experiment (BioCON).
Abstract: Predicting if ecosystems will mitigate or exacerbate rising CO2 requires understanding how elevated CO2 will interact with coincident changes in diversity and nitrogen (N) availability to affect ecosystem carbon (C) storage. Yet achieving such understanding has been hampered by the difficulty of quantifying belowground C pools and fluxes. Thus, we used mass balance calculations to quantify the effects of diversity, CO2, and N on both the total amount of C allocated belowground by plants (total belowground C allocation, TBCA) and ecosystem C storage in a periodically burned, 8-year Minnesota grassland biodiversity, CO2, and N experiment (BioCON). Annual TBCA increased in response to elevated CO2, enriched N, and increasing diversity. TBCA was positively related to standing root biomass. After removing the influence of root biomass, the effect of elevated CO2 remained positive, suggesting additional drivers of TBCA apart from those that maintain high root biomass. Removing root biomass effects resulted in the effects of N and diversity becoming neutral or negative (depending on year), suggesting that the positive effects of diversity and N on TBCA were related to treatmentdriven differences in root biomass. Greater litter production in high diversity, elevated CO2, and enhanced N treatments increased annual ecosystem C loss in fire years and C gain in non-fire years, resulting in overall neutral C storage rates. Our results suggest that frequently burned grasslands are unlikely to exhibit enhanced C sequestration with increasing atmospheric CO2 levels or N deposition.

108 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the challenges of describing fuels, contrast approaches (association, classification and abstraction) for developing fuel description systems and discuss possible future directions inwildlandfueldescriptionandciencetto-ransitiontoauniversalfuel description system.
Abstract: Wildland fuelbeds are exceptionally complex, consisting of diverse particles of many sizes, types and shapes with abundances and properties that are highlyvariable in time and space. This complexity makes it difficult to accurately describe, classify, sample and map fuels for wildland fire research and management. As a result, many fire behaviour and effects software predictionsystems usea generalised description of fuels tosimplify data collection and entry into various computer programs. There are several major fuel description systems currently used in the United States, Canada and Australia, and this is a source of confusion for many in fire management. This paper (1) summarises the challenges of describing fuels, (2) contrasts approaches (association, classification and abstraction) for developing fuel description systemsand(3)discussespossiblefuturedirectionsinwildlandfueldescriptionandsciencetotransitiontoauniversalfuel description system. Most discussion centres on surface fuel loadings as the primary descriptive characteristic. This synthesis paper is intended to provide background for understanding surface fuel classification and description systems and their use in simulating fire behaviour and effects, quantifying carbon inventories and evaluating site productivity. Additional keywords: fire behaviour, fire effects, fuel classification, fuel inventory, fuel models.

104 citations

References
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Book
06 Mar 1997
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a perspective of the global cycle of nitrogen and phosphorous, the global water cycle, and the global sulfur cycle from a global point of view.
Abstract: Part 1 Processes and reactions: origins the atmosphere the lithosphere the terrestrial biosphere biogeochemical cycling on land biogeochemistry in freshwater wetlands and lakes rivers and estuaries the sea. Part 2 Global cycles: the global water cycle the global carbon cycle the global cycle of nitrogen and phosphorous the global sulfur cycle a perspective.

3,871 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
14 Jan 1994-Science
TL;DR: Slowing deforestation, combined with an increase in forestation and other management measures to improve forest ecosystem productivity, could conserve or sequester significant quantities of carbon.
Abstract: Forest systems cover more than 4.1 x 109 hectares of the Earth9s land area. Globally, forest vegetation and soils contain about 1146 petagrams of carbon, with approximately 37 percent of this carbon in low-latitude forests, 14 percent in mid-latitudes, and 49 percent at high latitudes. Over two-thirds of the carbon in forest ecosystems is contained in soils and associated peat deposits. In 1990, deforestation in the low latitudes emitted 1.6 ± 0.4 petagrams of carbon per year, whereas forest area expansion and growth in mid- and high-latitude forest sequestered 0.7 ± 0.2 petagrams of carbon per year, for a net flux to the atmosphere of 0.9 ± 0.4 petagrams of carbon per year. Slowing deforestation, combined with an increase in forestation and other management measures to improve forest ecosystem productivity, could conserve or sequester significant quantities of carbon. Future forest carbon cycling trends attributable to losses and regrowth associated with global climate and land-use change are uncertain. Model projections and some results suggest that forests could be carbon sinks or sources in the future.

3,175 citations


"Fire suppression and ecosystem carb..." refers background or methods in this paper

  • ...…biomass creates ;20–25% of annual anthropogenic CO2 (Andreae 1991, Schimel 1995), modifications of fire frequency may significantly change regional and global C budgets (e.g., Fahenstock and Agee 1983, Andreae 1991, Stocks 1991, Dixon and Krankina 1993, Dixon et al. 1994, Sohngen and Haynes 1997)....

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  • ...This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant 9411972 and by the Andrew Mellon Foundation....

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  • ...Our work supports the proposal that increased fire suppression and decreased anthropogenic burning of vegetation could significantly influence global carbon dynamics (Dixon et al. 1994, Sampson and Clark 1995, Sohngen and Haynes 1997, San Jose et al. 1998)....

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  • ...Dixon et al. (1994) calculated that fire management in Russia could lead to long-term C storage of 0.6 3 1015 g C/yr....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The terrestrial biosphere plays an important role in the global carbon cycle as mentioned in this paper, which is the fluxes of carbon among four main reservoirs: fossil carbon, the atmosphere, the oceans, and the terrestrial Biosphere.
Abstract: The terrestrial biosphere plays an important role in the global carbon cycle. In the 1994 Intergovernmental Panel Assessment on Climate Change (IPCC), an effort was made to improve the quantification of terrestrial exchanges and potential feedbacks from climate, changing CO2, and other factors; this paper presents the key results from that assessment, together with expanded discussion. The carbon cycle is the fluxes of carbon among four main reservoirs: fossil carbon, the atmosphere, the oceans, and the terrestrial biosphere. Emissions of fossil carbon during the 1980s averaged 5.5 Gt y−1. During the same period, the atmosphere gained 3.2 Gt C y−1 and the oceans are believed to have absorbed 2.0 Gt C y−1. The regrowing forests of the Northern Hemisphere may have absorbed 0.5 Gt C y−1 during this period. Meanwhile, tropical deforestation is thought to have released an average 1.6 Gt C y−1 over the 1980s. While the fluxes among the four pools should balance, the average 198Ds values lead to a ‘missing sink’ of 1.4 Gt C y−1 Several processes, including forest regrowth, CO2 fertilization of plant growth (c. 1.0 Gt C y−1), N deposition (c. 0.6 Gt C y−1), and their interactions, may account for the budget imbalance. However, it remains difficult to quantify the influences of these separate but interactive processes. Uncertainties in the individual numbers are large, and are themselves poorly quantified. This paper presents detail beyond the IPCC assessment on procedures used to approximate the flux uncertainties. Lack of knowledge about positive and negative feedbacks from the biosphere is a major limiting factor to credible simulations of future atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Analyses of the atmospheric gradients of CO2 and 13 CO2 concentrations provide increasingly strong evidence for terrestrial sinks, potentially distributed between Northern Hemisphere and tropical regions, but conclusive detection in direct biomass and soil measurements remains elusive. Current regional-to-global terrestrial ecosystem models with coupled carbon and nitrogen cycles represent the effects of CO2 fertilization differently, but all suggest longterm responses to CO2 that are substantially smaller than potential leaf- or laboratory whole plant-level responses. Analyses of emissions and biogeochemical fluxes consistent with eventual stabilization of atmospheric CO2 concentrations are sensitive to the way in which biospheric feedbacks are modeled by c. 15%. Decisions about land use can have effects of 100s of Gt C over the next few centuries, with similarly significant effects on the atmosphere. Critical areas for future research are continued measurements and analyses of atmospheric data (CO2 and 13CO2) to serve as large-scale constraints, process studies of the scaling from the photosynthetic response to CO2 to whole-ecosystem carbon storage, and rigorous quantification of the effects of changing land use on carbon storage.

1,510 citations


"Fire suppression and ecosystem carb..." refers background or methods in this paper

  • ...2680 Key words: carbon storage; fire suppression; missing carbon; oak savanna....

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  • ...San Jose et al. (1998) calculated that fire suppression, by causing the transformation of the 2.8 3 107 ha Venezuelan Orinoco Llanos from grassland to semideciduous forest, could lead to a C sink of 0.08 3 1015 g C/yr....

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  • ...Atmospheric CO2 is currently accumulating at ;3.2 3 1015 g C/yr (Schimel 1995)....

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  • ...Dixon et al. (1994) calculated that fire management in Russia could lead to long-term C storage of 0.6 3 1015 g C/yr....

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  • ...Because the burning of ecosystem biomass creates ;20–25% of annual anthropogenic CO2 (Andreae 1991, Schimel 1995), modifications of fire frequency may significantly change regional and global C budgets (e.g., Fahenstock and Agee 1983, Andreae 1991, Stocks 1991, Dixon and Krankina 1993, Dixon et al.…...

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The first edition of Schlesinger's Biogeochemistry in 1991 was an early entry in the field of Earth system science/global change, and has since gained sufficient popularity and demand to merit a second, extensively revised edition.
Abstract: Compared to the well-established disciplines, the field of Earth system science/global change has relatively few books from which to choose. Of the small subset of books dealing specifically with biogeochemical aspects of global change, the first edition of Schlesinger's Biogeochemistry in 1991 was an early entry. It has since gained sufficient popularity and demand to merit a second, extensively revised edition. The first part of the book provides a general introduction to biogeochemistry and cycles, and to the origin of elements, our planet, and life on Earth. It then describes the functioning and biogeochemistry of the atmosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere, including marine and freshwater systems. Although system function and features are stressed, the author begins to introduce global change topics, such as soil organic matter and global change in Chapter 5, and landscape and mass balance in Chapter 6.

1,075 citations


"Fire suppression and ecosystem carb..." refers background or methods in this paper

  • ...This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant 9411972 and by the Andrew Mellon Foundation....

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  • ...Moreover, the immense global extent of tropical savanna and woodland, 2.45 3 109 ha (Schlesinger 1997), suggests that even moderate fire suppression in this ecosystem type could provide a globally significant C sink....

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Journal ArticleDOI
23 Jul 1999-Science
TL;DR: The rates at which lands in the United States were cleared for agriculture, abandoned, harvested for wood, and burned were reconstructed from historical data for the period 1700-1990 and used in a terrestrial carbon model to calculate annual changes in the amount of carbon stored in terrestrial ecosystems, including wood products.
Abstract: The rates at which lands in the United States were cleared for agriculture, abandoned, harvested for wood, and burned were reconstructed from historical data for the period 1700-1990 and used in a terrestrial carbon model to calculate annual changes in the amount of carbon stored in terrestrial ecosystems, including wood products. Changes in land use released 27 +/- 6 petagrams of carbon to the atmosphere before 1945 and accumulated 2 +/- 2 petagrams of carbon after 1945, largely as a result of fire suppression and forest growth on abandoned farmlands. During the 1980s, the net flux of carbon attributable to land management offset 10 to 30 percent of U.S. fossil fuel emissions.

1,035 citations


"Fire suppression and ecosystem carb..." refers background or methods in this paper

  • ...Houghton et al. (1999) estimated various sources of C storage in the United States....

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  • ...Because fire suppression might lead to a period of C accumulation (Houghton et al. 1999), current fire suppression in the United States (Fig....

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  • ...This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant 9411972 and by the Andrew Mellon Foundation....

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  • ...2680 Key words: carbon storage; fire suppression; missing carbon; oak savanna....

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