Mineral soil carbon fluxes in forests and implications for carbon balance assessments
Författare
Summary, in English
Forest carbon cycles play an important role in efforts to understand and mitigate climate change. Large amounts of carbon (C) are stored in deep mineral forest soils, but are often not considered in accounting for global C fluxes because mineral soil C is commonly thought to be relatively stable. We explore C fluxes associated with forest management practices by examining existing data on forest C fluxes in the northeastern US. Our findings demonstrate that mineral soil C can play an important role in C emissions, especially when considering intensive forest management practices. Such practices are known to cause a high aboveground C flux to the atmosphere, but there is evidence that they can also promote comparably high and long-term belowground C fluxes. If these additional fluxes are widespread in forests, recommendations for increased reliance on forest biomass may need to be reevaluated. Furthermore, existing protocols for the monitoring of forest C often ignore mineral soil C due to lack of data. Forest C analyses will be incomplete until this problem is resolved.
Publiceringsår
2014-07
Språk
Engelska
Sidor
305-311
Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie
Global Change Biology Bioenergy
Volym
6
Issue
4
Dokumenttyp
Artikel i tidskrift
Förlag
John Wiley & Sons Inc.
Ämne
- Physical Geography
Nyckelord
- carbon accounting
- deep soil mineral carbon
- Forest carbon pool
- assessments
- forest soil
- stand level carbon dynamics
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt
- ISSN: 1757-1693