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Fire effects on the persistence of soil organic matter and long-term carbon storage

Abstract

One paradigm in biogeochemistry is that frequent disturbance tends to deplete carbon (C) in soil organic matter (SOM) by reducing biomass inputs and promoting losses. However, disturbance by fire has challenged this paradigm because soil C responses to frequent and/or intense fires are highly variable, despite observed declines in biomass inputs. Here, we review recent advances to illustrate that fire-driven changes in decomposition, mediated by altered SOM stability, are an important compensatory process offsetting declines in aboveground biomass pools. Fire alters the stability of SOM by affecting both the physicochemical properties of the SOM and the environmental drivers of decomposition, potentially offsetting C lost via combustion, but the mechanisms affecting the SOM stability differ across ecosystems. Thus, shifting our focus from a top-down view of fire impacting C cycling via changes in plant biomass to a bottom-up view of changes in decomposition may help to elucidate counterintuitive trends in the response of SOM to burning. Given that 70% of global topsoil C is in fire-prone regions, using fire to promote SOM stability may be an important nature-based climate solution to increase C storage.

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Fig. 1: Distribution of topsoil organic C and fire frequency across the globe.
Fig. 2: SOC stocks vulnerable to fire.
Fig. 3: The balance between changes in decomposition-based losses of SOM versus biomass-based inputs into SOM may influence fire effects on SOM stocks.
Fig. 4: Factors that influence SOM stability that may be influenced by fire.
Fig. 5: Stabilization dynamics differ across ecosystems and can inform fire management for nature-based climate solutions.

Data availability

All data are available from the databases cited in the text or as supplements online to the various meta-analyses.

Code availability

All analyses were conducted using standard code packages.

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Acknowledgements

A.F.A.P. acknowledges support from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation. This paper is a result of a meeting of the Plant and Soil group in the Department of Earth System Science and Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. K.S.H. was supported by the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and The Center for Ecosystem Climate Solutions. K.G. was supported as a Lawrence Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) by the LLNL-LDRD Program under Project No. 21-ERD-045. Work at LLNL was conducted under the auspices of the US DOE Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. R.B.J. acknowledges support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Comments by W. Anderegg, J. Schoenecker and E. Wilding improved the manuscript.

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A.F.A.P. conceived of the project and led the writing of the text. All other authors provided substantial conceptual input and contributed to the writing. K.G. and A.F.A.P. produced Figs. 1 and 2, and 3 and 4, respectively, and jointly produced Table 1.

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Correspondence to Adam F. A. Pellegrini.

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Peer review information Nature Geoscience thanks Giacomo Certini, Stefan Doerr and Matthew Jones for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editors: Kyle Frischkorn and Xujia Jiang.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Ecoregion distribution.

Distribution of ecoregions used in the calculations for Table 1.

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Pellegrini, A.F.A., Harden, J., Georgiou, K. et al. Fire effects on the persistence of soil organic matter and long-term carbon storage. Nat. Geosci. 15, 5–13 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00867-1

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