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University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point > University Communications and Marketing > UWSP in the News > More frequent fires reduce soil carbon and fertility, slowing the regrowth of plants
More frequent fires reduce soil carbon and fertility, slowing the regrowth of plants
1/4/2018
Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

​Bryant Scharenbroch, assistant professor of soil and waste resources at UW-Stevens Point was part of this study, published in Nature, that found frequent fires over many years have significant impacts on carbon storage and fertility of soil. He provided a dataset on Midwestern forests and was a coauthor on the paper.

By Sarah Derouin

Frequent burning over decades reduces the amount of carbon and nitrogen stored in soils of savanna grasslands and broadleaf forests, in part because reduced plant growth means less carbon being drawn out of the atmosphere and stored in plant matter. These findings by a Stanford-led team are important for worldwide understanding of fire impacts on the carbon cycle and for modeling the future of global carbon and climate change.

The results, published Dec. 11 in the journal Nature, offer a new perspective on the impact of fire on soil fertility.

“Almost all the synthesis studies done to date conclude that fire has relatively little effect on soils, but in large part, researchers focused on a single fire event,” said Adam Pellegrini, a post-doctoral scholar at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and lead author on the study.

Instead, this study examined soil carbon and fertility in different ecosystems over 65 years.

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Article Tags

CNR; Sustainable
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