National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory
National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology Fire decline in dry tropical ecosystems enhances decadal land carbon sink Yi Yin, A. Anthony Bloom, John Worden, Sassan Saatchi, Yang, Mathew Williams, Junjie Liu, Zhe Jiang, Helen Worden, Kevin Bowman, Christian Frankenberg, David Schimel Background & Science Questions • A 25% decline in the global burned area (BA) from 1997 to 2015 has been observed. While changes in fire emissions are considered for the global carbon budget, its impacts on the terrestrial carbon cycling are not explicitly estimated. • What are the impacts on the carbon cycling at a decal scale? Most BA declines occurred in savanna and grassland Results Significance • Using CARDAMOM — a carbon cycle model • Our results suggest that the indirect effects of fire is an constrained by atmospheric and land-surface C overlooked mechanism for explaining decadal-scale observations — we show that a decline of changes in the land carbon sink. 0. 2± 0. 1 Pg. C yr-1 in fire emissions during 2008 - • Increasing population densities and cropland area have 2014 relative to 2001 -2007 also induced an been shown to decrease global BA since the 1930 s. additional carbon sink enhancement of 0. 4± 0. 2 Missing this important mechanism in explaining the Pg. C yr-1 attributable to carbon cycle feedbacks. global carbon sink increase over the past decades • The impacts amount to a combined sink increase could lead to an overestimation of other processes and comparable to the 0. 6 Pg. C yr-1 budget imbalance thus bias future carbon-climate feedback projections. as reported by the Global Carbon Project. • Highlight the importance of fire management in climate mitigation. Acknowledgement Funding for this study was provided through NASA ROSES Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems (#13 -CARBON 13_2 -0071) and NASA Earth IDS (NNH 16 ZDA 001 N-IDS). Yin, Y. , Bloom, A. A. , Worden, J. et al. Fire decline in dry tropical ecosystems enhances decadal land carbon sink. Nat Commun 11, 1900 (2020). https: //doi. org/10. 1038/s 41467 -020 -15852 -2
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