Temperature and precipitation influence where tree species are capable of growing and how quickly they grow in a particular location. Climate essentially acts as a filter on what species can occur in a given location. Another filter that influences both species occurrence and growth is what other species are growing in a particular location. This is because individual trees are competing for resources (water, light, space) and resource requirements and competitive ability varies between species. As a result, even if climatic conditions are sufficient for a species, the species may be excluded from a site because it can’t compete with other species that are already present on the site. In a recent study led by Danelle Laflower, we set out to determine how changing climate would influence the distribution of species and how quickly they would grow and store carbon. We also wanted to determine if management activities could alter the effects of changing climate on the forest’s ability to store carbon. We conducted the study at Joint Base Lewis-McCord (JBLM) in Washington with support from the Department of Defense’s SERDP program. JBLM is an important piece of real estate from an ecological perspective because it is situated in a highly fragmented environment. It is predominantly Douglas-fir forest, but also contains patches of old-growth western hemlock and western redcedar. The other attribute that makes this site ecologically important is that it contains prairies and woodlands that are home to several threatened or endangered species. Over the past 90 years or so, the prairies and woodlands were invaded by Douglas-fir trees, converting much of their original area to forest cover. In the absence of disturbance, the natural progression in these forests is from Douglas-fir to western hemlock and western redcedar. This is because Douglas-fir requires more light for seedlings to establish and has trouble regenerating in its own shade, whereas western hemlock and western redcedar are capable of regenerating in their own shade. We used the LANDIS-II model and climate model projections from moderate and high emission scenarios to simulate forest dynamics. While both emission scenarios resulted in warmer temperatures and generally lower precipitation, the higher emission scenario causes more warming and lower summer precipitation. The increase in temperature is greatest during the second half of the 21st century. We also included management scenarios that included a no-action control, prescribed burning, thinning, and thinning and prescribed burning. To determine the effect of changing climate on the number of species at each location across the installation, we looked at the number of locations (frequency) that had a particular number of tree species. We found that there was little difference in species richness (# of species) between simulations run with historic or baseline climate (red line) and simulations run with climate from the moderate emission scenario (blue and green lines). However, when we ran simulations with climate from the high emission scenario we found a decrease in the number of areas with a larger number of tree species (purple and orange lines). This was in part the result of lower growing season precipitation. Under the historic and moderate emission climate scenarios, moisture loving species like western hemlock and western redcedar are able to establish and grow under Douglas-fir. Under the high emission scenario, dry, warm summers prevent these species from establishing. To measure the effects of changing climate on forest growth and carbon storage, we used net ecosystem carbon balance (NECB). NECB is measure of how much carbon is moving between the atmosphere and the forest. When NECB is above zero, the forest is removing carbon from the atmosphere and when it is below zero, the forest is losing carbon to the atmosphere. The larger the NECB value, the more carbon the forest is removing from the atmosphere. Similar to the species richness results, climate from the moderate emission scenario (left panel, orange and purple) had little effect on NECB compared to the historic climate scenario (left panel green). However, under the high emission scenario (right panel orange and purple), the forest showed a steep decline in how much carbon it was removing from the atmosphere each year beginning in 2075. Since part of the decrease in the forest’s ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere is driven by trees competing for water, we evaluated the effects of different management actions on NECB. Typically when a dense forest is thinned to reduce competition, the remaining trees grow faster and remove more carbon from the atmosphere. We thought that thinning or burning might reduce competition and slow the decline in how quickly the forest was removing carbon from the atmosphere. We found that thinning (left panel green) and thinning combined with prescribed fire (left panel purple) both increased NECB relative to the control (left panel red) after about 40 years under baseline or historic climate scenario. This caused the rate of carbon being removed from the atmosphere to stabilize beginning around 2050. Under the high emission climate scenario (right panel), these management actions also increased NECB compared to the control, but they were unable to stop the overall decline that was caused by higher temperatures and lower summer precipitation. Our results demonstrate that the changes in climate that we expect with a business-as-usual high emission scenario could cause a decrease in growth and a reduction in tree species richness. In areas that are especially water-stressed, this could prevent the natural progression of changes in dominant tree species.
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When fire burns in a forest, some of the plant material is heated in the absence of oxygen. This process creates something called black carbon (you can read more about that on Jessica Miesel’s page). This by-product of fire has garnered a lot of interest because it is a stable form of carbon and can stick around in the ecosystem for a long time. One part of the black carbon continuum is charcoal. It is similar to the nuggets you put in your BBQ, but the pieces are a lot smaller. In a recent paper led by Morgan Wiechmann, we quantified the amount of charcoal produced in the prescribed burning treatments in the Teakettle Experiment. We set out to test the hypothesis that more charcoal would be produced from large logs than would be produced from small sticks. We also wanted to figure out how much charcoal in general prescribed burning produced because we assume when making fire emissions calculations that if the dead wood was there before the fire and is gone afterward, that it ended up as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. To test the hypothesis, Morgan and her field crew sampled along logs and along a transect running perpendicular to the logs. She sampled the organic matter (dead leaves) and top 5 centimeters of the mineral soil. Then after hand-picking out all of the pieces bigger than 2 mm, she ran an analysis to compare the amount of charcoal near the logs and the amount away from the logs (where the small sticks are). As it turns out, we were wrong and rejected our hypothesis. We didn’t find any difference in the amount of charcoal near or away from the logs. However, we did find that the burning treatments did have more charcoal than the unburned control treatments. As you can see in the figure, the mineral soil (A horizon) had more charcoal than the organic layer. From a carbon storage perspective, this is a good thing because it means the charcoal is getting incorporated into the soil where it is likely to stay for a while. The other thing that was interesting is the amount of charcoal in the unburned control. Teakettle last had a natural fire in 1865! This result shows us charcoal can stay in the system for a good long time.
Overall, charcoal carbon at Teakettle accounts for less than 1% of the total carbon in the system. While not much, even accounting for this little bit helps improve our understanding of how disturbances, such as fire, impact the forest carbon cycle. This work was funded by a Joint Fire Science Program Graduate Research Innovation Award to Morgan Wiechmann In some forests, frequent fire is a natural part of the system and serves many different purposes. In the frequent-fire forests of the US, we have been putting out fires for the better part of a century. Removing this natural disturbance has allowed more trees to grow and a build-up of dead plant material in the forest understory. These changes have increased the risk of large and severe wildfires. Research by Leroy Westerling and colleagues has demonstrated a steady rise in the area burned by wildfire in recent decades and as the climate continues to change it is likely to keep increasing. People are concerned about wildfire for several reasons. In the US we spend $1-2 billion per year fighting wildfires. The costs go even higher when we account for property loss due to wildfire. Smoke from wildfire contains all kinds of chemicals that are bad for human health, in some cases requiring people living near active fires to remain inside their homes. On top of the factors that influence people, wildfires can have some pretty significant impacts on the ecosystems they burn. Most recently, we have been paying attention to the loss of carbon from wildfires because trees help regulate our climate by removing carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) from the atmosphere. One of the issues with reducing the risk of large, hot fires is that it requires harvesting trees (removal of carbon) and prescribed burning (sending carbon back to the atmosphere). And if we want to maintain reduced fire risk and avoid the need to continually thin forests, regular burning will be required. These factors create a bit of a conundrum. Forests are helping fight climate change by storing carbon. Large wildfires are on the increase and they emit carbon to the atmosphere. To reduce the risk of large wildfires we have to remove carbon from forests and send some of it back to the atmosphere through regular burning. This leads us to the central question of our recent paper led by Morgan Wiechmann – how does the carbon balance of these treatments change over time? To answer this question, we used data from the Teakettle Experiment collected for ten years following several different thinning and burning treatments. We had already used the pre- and immediately post-treatment data to figure out that cutting down trees and burning the forest causes a decrease in carbon stored in the forest (you can read about that here). While this wasn’t a surprise to anyone, you have to know where you are to figure out where you are going and you have to know where you’ve been to figure out how you got there. Enter our most recent work, funded by the Joint Fire Science Program. There were some findings that were no big surprise. We know big trees store a lot of carbon. Some of the biggest at Teakettle weigh as much as 16 average sized cars and about half that weight is carbon. So, no big surprise that when you cut down a bunch of big trees, it is going to take a while to grow more big trees and recapture that carbon in the forest. But the two most interesting things this research uncovered had to do with the carbon balance of fire emissions and the effects of treatments on carbon stored the in the remaining big trees. We know from previous work that before we started putting out fires, Teakettle burned on average about every 17 years and that a majority of the carbon was stored in big trees. By quantifying the carbon that was recaptured by the growing trees over the 10-year period, we figured out that when we just used prescribed fire, tree growth pulls out of the atmosphere about twice as much carbon as was emitted during the fire. This suggests that if we restore regular fire and burn this forest every 17 years or so, forest carbon will continue to increase. Mean and standard error of C pools pre-treatment (1999), immediately post-treatment (2002) and 10-years post-treatment (2011) in Mg C ha-1. Ten-year net biome productivity (solid blue bar) is the 10-year net ecosystem productivity minus C removed and emitted during treatment implementation in Mg C ha-1. Soil and shrub C values are not included in the pre-treatment (1999) C stocks. Nate Stephenson and colleagues recently demonstrated that a big tree can add a small tree worth of carbon in a single year of growth. That fact is what makes understanding what the big trees are doing important. In this study we found that the treatments affect different species of big trees in different ways. We had expected that treatments that included burning would have a bigger effect on fir trees because they are intolerant of fire when they are young and we expected pine trees to do well because they have thick bark that protects them from the heat. White fir, which is by far the most common species at Teakettle, had a small decrease in one thin-and-burn treatment and a small increase in the other. Sugar pine increased quite a bit in the thin-only treatments, held steady in the burn-only, and decreased in the thin-and-burn treatments. So much for expectations…
However, that made us think about why a species like sugar pine, that is supposed to be adapted to fire, is getting killed by prescribed fire and why a species like white fir that is considered intolerant of fire wasn’t all that impacted by burning treatments. What we think is going on is that white fir has thin bark when it is young and small and thick bark when it is old and big. So, the whole fire intolerance idea may very well be a function of age and size. What we think is happening with the big sugar pines is that after 100+ years without fire, the amount of dead needles at the base of the big trees provides fuel for the fire to sit and smolder. This is kind of like slow-roasting a marshmallow, when you put it next to the fire the outside is gooey and then it firms up when you roast it. Well, underneath that thick pine bark you’ve got all the tissue that carries water and nutrients. When a fire smolders for long enough at a high enough temperature the conductive tissue gets cooked and kills the tree. Thus, another conundrum – we know fire is important in Sierran mixed-conifer forest (you can watch a video about it here), but putting fire back into the forest is killing some of what we are trying to protect. Fortunately all is not lost. In some of these treatments we cut down a bunch of medium-sized trees. If we account for the fact that some big ones may die when we bring fire back, we can a leave of few more medium-sized trees that will grow into big trees. And when big trees die, they don’t evaporate into thin air. All that carbon stays on the site for a while because it takes some time for the wood to decompose. Big dead trees are also important wildlife habitat. With all the bugs that move in, they can become a buffet for woodpeckers and as they decompose and cavities form, a number of animals will call them home. Circling back to the big question - how does the carbon balance of these treatments change over time? – we found that the treatments that included only burning or only thinning small trees recaptured the carbon that was lost from treatment in ten years. The treatment that included thinning small trees and burning still had less carbon than it did initially, indicating that we need to keep some more medium-sized trees. The treatments that harvested big trees still have a carbon debt from treatment. This work provides additional evidence that we can restore these fire-prone forests without having too big an impact on the climate, as long as the trees keep growing. |
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