Forests could be emitting more carbon than is believed, because they store large and previously unrecognized quantities of dead wood.
Such wood provides resources for new growth but releases carbon as it decays. Marion Pfeifer at Imperial College London and her team examined the amount of dead wood in 193 plots measuring 25 metres by 25 metres in Sabah, Malaysia. The plots ranged from pristine forest to areas that had been cleared for oil-palm plantations.
The authors estimated that dead wood can hold just 5.4% of the carbon in some pristine forest, but may contain up to 64% of the carbon at sites where selected trees had been logged. This value is higher than is often assumed in the literature, they say, suggesting that some estimates of the net amount of carbon trapped by living wood in forests may be too high.
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Failing to see dead wood for the trees. Nature 521, 9 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/521009a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/521009a
