> "We can expect the carbon pool stored in these forests to increase substantially,"
Interesting. I would have guessed that any kind of forests have quite limited cap how much carbon it could retain in dead wood, and that this cap will be pretty much fixed. Unless something will stop natural decay processes releasing the carbon back to the atmosphere I don't see how existing grown forest could increase its capacity, since I suppose it is already at its equilibrium.
(Unlike peatlands, where most of accumulated carbon remains underwater, so it presumably has much larger capacity.)
Simply said, without "burying or sinking wood mass" I see no easy way to prevent carbon from returning into the atmosphere. Basically if we need to take carbon from the atmosphere, we should ideally put it back from where we have been mining it for last couple of centuries.
> I would have guessed that any kind of forests have quite limited cap how much carbon it could retain in dead wood
The article says, "We found that a forest that's developing toward old-growth condition is accruing more wood in the stream than is being lost through decomposition" and "The effect will continue in coming decades, Keeton said, because many mature New England forests are only about halfway through their long recovery from 19th- and 20th-century clearing for timber and agriculture".
Ah, overlooked they actually acknowledge the "cap" directly in the preceding paragraph, and even put it into "coming decades" time frame. Makes much more sense now, thanks for the pointer!
Still a bit confused about the emphasis in wood deposits in "streams" – reportedly way more effective, but I'd guess with very limited capacity to really "lock" the mass – compared to regular hummus – not that effective, but for forest with couple of centuries of growth ahead I'd guess way more capacious. Good news either way, though!
Reading between the lines in the article (which is of course always subject to incorrect interpretation) I think the reason for the focus on streams is just that nobody else has looked at that before and thus it is a factor not previously accounted for. Other sources have already been accounted for - they may be worth more than what is in streams, but it is already known so the article didn't mention them.
“Coming decades” is an understatement. It depends on local conditions but douglas fir pines in the PNW take 200-300 years to decay completely, so that’s centuries more of carbon capture as long as we let our forests rewild. Realistically a forest becomes old growth once there are at least three generations of trees in various states of decay. That may decades in warmer climates but much longer in the north.
Don't forget about the root system, a large part of a tree is underground, so naturally buried
I'd call it semi-buried, since it is not isolated from the atmosphere, so in a long term I suspect that almost all its mass gets re-circulated back again – still through microbes, fungi, insects, and perhaps living root systems of surrounding trees. (Last time I tried to get some data about how much carbon remains in the soil after aerobic wood/plants decomposition in agriculture I remember it was pretty much negligible. Forest have way higher limits for maximum soil carbon accumulation, but this limit is reportedly reached after about three centuries of uninterrupted growth.)
Depends on the ecosystem. Anything embedded into bogs or peatland like roots will generally not decay at all, instead building up a very thick layer of captured carbon as peat.
Plants get most of their carbon from CO2 anyway, so in most cases carbon accumulates in the loam (outside of intensive agriculture at least). They produce far more than decomposers have a use for and that's how CO2 accumulates in soil. It only needs to be replenished by the rest of the carbon cycle because of erosion.
It takes a long time to reach that equilibrium and something can disrupt it along the way. Inevitably what happens is, as the amount of dead wood increases, so does the fire risk, and when it burns its all returned to the atmosphere. This is compounded by the fact that wildfire impact appears to be increasing significantly as the climate changes. Alternatively, humans cut it down because theres lots of large dense wood to grab.
> when it burns its all returned to the atmosphere
Not always. Depending on fire some of it is turned into charcoal and then never returned.
Agreed, "all" is an unfair word. Thanks. It's more accurate to say the majority of it is returned to the atmosphere. Less than 1% of burned fuel typically becomes organic carbon, but also not all of the biomass exposed will actually burn either. There's also trace amounts of other content and a lot of particulate matter (which one may or may not consider as carbon 'returned to the atmosphere' I suppose)
1% add up if we can do it worldwide on a regular basis. (likely yearly, but you need the proper forester for each forest)
For that <1% left as carbon, comes >75% released as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, which needs to be recaptured. Tree capture by itself is already too inefficient -- you need to cover roughly the entire area of new mexico with trees to account for just one year of America's emissions. If you're only sustainably capturing 1% of that capture, we're nowhere near the order of magnitude necessary to be impactful on a global scale.
Further, even if we didn't face the issue of running out of land, we don't appear to be able to actually plant trees fast enough and well enough (many of the "millions of trees" planting projects, especially in developing nations, have had tree survival rates of under 10%)
Forests help and are part of the strategy, but fundamentally not moving the needle.