Replanting trees after events like last year’s catastrophic Western wildfires not only is critical to forest recovery, but could actually help soils take up more carbon from the atmosphere than if the burned areas were just left idle or cultivated.
Replanting trees after events like last year’s catastrophic Western wildfires not only is critical to forest recovery, but could actually help soils take up more carbon from the atmosphere than if the burned areas were just left idle or cultivated.
That’s according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) coauthored by Umakant Mishra — a geospatial scientist in the Environmental Science division of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory — and six other researchers from across the country. The goal of their study was to determine how much carbon is absorbed, or sequestered, in the topsoils of reforested areas compared with pristine forest and disturbed land. The researchers found that in the next 100 years, already existing reforestation in the country could help topsoil absorb an additional 2 billion tons of carbon, which is about 1 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
“When people measure carbon sequestration they typically focus on the vegetation, because it is much easier to see and measure. No one has published an analysis like this with soils before.” — Luke Nave, research scientist with the University of Michigan and the Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science
“If there’s a small change in soil carbon, it can affect the carbon in the atmosphere dramatically,” Mishra said. “We tried to find lands that are undergoing reforestation in the United States to determine at what rate they’re sequestering carbon. Using our analyses, we found there’s about a half million square kilometers in the U.S. under reforestation currently.”
Read more at DOE/Argonne National Laboratory
Image: In a recent study, Argonne researchers helped determine the rate at which reforested and undisturbed forest soils absorb carbon from the atmosphere. They found that in the next 100 years, already existing reforestation in the country could help topsoil absorb an additional 2 billion tons of carbon. (Credit: Image by Argonne National Laboratory)
