Assessing Wood and Soil Carbon Losses from a Forest-Peat Fire in the Boreo-Nemoral Zone

Abstract

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.

High-resolution data reveal a surge of biomass loss from temperate and Atlantic pine forests, contextualizing the 2022 fire season distinctiveness in France

“…As forest ecosystems contribute to several ecosystem services (Ninan and Inoue, 2014;Mori et al, 2017), including regulating (carbon sequestration), provisioning (timber and non-timber products), cultural (recreational, aesthetic), and supporting (decomposition, nutrient cycling) purposes, defining a prefire state is topic specific. Tree aboveground biomass is a crucial spatial variable used to evaluate the impact of fires and the resilience of ecosystem services to fires (Díaz et al, 2018;Martínez-Batlle, 2022;Powell et al, 2014;Sirin et al, 2021;Tyukavina et al, 2022;Volkova and Weston, 2015;Wu et al, 2020), as it serves as a proxy for wood resources and habitat for wildlife and biodiversity (Fusco et al, 2021;Basile et al, 2021;Cazzolla Gatti et al, 2017).…”

Remote Sensing Mapping of Peat-Fire-Burnt Areas: Identification among Other Wildfires

“…This factor also applies to solving the problems of estimating related to peat-fire carbon losses and greenhouse gas emissions. The IPCC Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Inventories [27][28][29] propose methodologies to account for emissions from wildfires from biomass burning only. The [26]) resulted in damage to tree roots and the complete death of the tree stand.…”

“…This factor also applies to solving the problems of estimating related to peat-fire carbon losses and greenhouse gas emissions. The IPCC Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Inventories [27][28][29] propose methodologies to account for emissions from wildfires from biomass burning only. The IPCC 2013 Supplement on Wetlands [7], which provides default methodologies and emission factors for CO 2 , CH 4 and CO emissions from fires on organic soils, notes the difficulty of determining areas burnt by peat fires and the need to develop country-specific, high-level (Tier 2 and 3) methodologies for determining burnt areas in countries with frequent peat fires.…”

Addressing Peatland Rewetting in Russian Federation Climate Reporting

“…Drained peatlands, especially when unused and abandoned, are extremely fireprone [5], because of the abundance of combustible material per unit area [6,7], and susceptibility to fire increases with the intensity of drainage [8].…”