Fire ecology articles within Nature Geoscience

Featured

  • Article |

    Carbon sequestration by Siberian forests has been low over the past decade due to disturbances that have decreased live biomass and increased dead wood, according to passive microwave observations.

    • Lei Fan
    • , Jean-Pierre Wigneron
    •  & Rasmus Fensholt

  • Article |

    Vegetation plays an important role in the aggregate carbon balance of fires, according to a 1901 to 2010 land surface model study that, assuming steady state, shows potentially greater pyrogenic carbon production than legacy losses at global scale, due mostly to grassland adaptations to fire.

    • Simon P. K. Bowring
    • , Matthew W. Jones
    •  & Samuel Abiven

  • Review Article |

    Fires reduce plant biomass, which should deplete soil carbon stocks, but a review of recent literature shows that fires also slow decomposition rates and increase soil organic matter stability, offsetting aboveground biomass carbon losses.

    • Adam F. A. Pellegrini
    • , Jennifer Harden
    •  & Robert B. Jackson

  • Article |

    Fire exacerbates forest degradation in the forest edge zones in Africa, increasing the carbon deficit caused by forest fragmentation, according to analyses of high-resolution satellite data on forest cover and biomass.

    • Zhe Zhao
    • , Wei Li
    •  & Jingmeng Wang

  • Editorial |

    Where there is smoke, there are radiative feedbacks. With wildfires becoming a growing problem in the Anthropocene, we need to better understand the influence of fire on the climate system.

  • Editorial |

    Wildfires are a natural part of many ecosystems, but they can become destructive and less predictable, especially when the system is perturbed. Human activities and climate change lead to interactions with fire dynamics that need our attention.

  • News & Views |

    Cumulative wildfires or prescribed burning produce different outcomes for the vegetation, suggest two long-term analyses of fire-affected ecosystems. Climate change and land management practices are altering how ecosystems function.

    • Mark A. Cochrane

  • Article |

    Fires and logging alter soil composition and result in a significant reduction of soil nutrients that lasts for decades after the disturbance, suggests an analysis of soil samples across a multi-century sequence in mountain ash forests.

    • Elle J. Bowd
    • , Sam C. Banks
    •  & David B. Lindenmayer

  • News & Views |

    Boreal forest fires tend to be more intense and lethal in North America than Eurasia. Differences in tree species composition explain these differences in fire regime, and lead to contrasting feedbacks to climate.

    • Mike Flannigan

  • Progress Article |

    The amount of carbon stored in peats exceeds that stored in vegetation. A synthesis of the literature suggests that smouldering fires in peatlands could become more common as the climate warms, and release old carbon to the air.

    • Merritt R. Turetsky
    • , Brian Benscoter
    •  & Adam Watts

  • News & Views |

    The extinction of megafauna in Australia roughly coincided with shifts in vegetation and fire regimes. Sediment geochemistry shows that the vegetation shift followed the extinction, indicating that the loss of browsers promoted fire and altered plant composition.

    • Beverly Johnson

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