Amazon PyroCarbon: Quantifying soil carbon responses to fire and climate change
Wildfire and Soil Carbon: A Major Knowledge Gap
Fires are increasing in Amazonia, transforming the region’s ability to store carbon. While the evaluation of fire’s effects has traditionally focused on aboveground carbon (the trees), a major knowledge gap exists in understanding what happens to the forest soil with wildfire.
Soil organic carbon (SOC) can store as much as half of the total carbon in a tropical forest. The impact of fire on this vast carbon pool, and the fate of new charcoal (black carbon or pyrogenic carbon, PyC) created by fire, is largely unknown. This project is a systematic, pan-Amazonian analysis of the response of SOC in Amazonian forests to recent fire, drought, and climate warming.
Our Project Aims
We aim to quantify how fire, forest degradation, and climate change affect soil organic carbon in the forests of Amazonia. To do this, we will:
- Quantify baseline SOC and PyC stocks in intact, old-growth forests.
- Analyze how SOC (including its different fractions) changes after forest fires by studying a “chronosequence”—a series of regrowing forest sites at different lengths of time post-fire.
- Measure soil respiration to understand how carbon loss varies with fire regime and climate.
- Improve the JULES land surface model to include new processes for pyrogenic carbon, allowing for better future projections.
- Provide data-driven recommendations for land management strategies that can help minimize SOC loss and support carbon budgets.
Our Approach
This project unites a world-class team of scientists from the UK, Brazil, Peru, and Australia. We will use an established network of forest plots across the Amazon ‘Arc of Deforestation and Degradation’.
Our research compares Intact Forests (IF) with Human-Modified Forests (HMF), including:
- Burned forests
- Logged-and-burned forests
- Secondary forests (areas that were deforested, burned, and abandoned)
By combining intensive field sampling, advanced laboratory analysis (including C isotopes and radiocarbon dating), remote sensing, and innovative modelling, we will provide a new understanding of this critical component of the global carbon cycle.