“Forest Carbon Emission Sources Are Not Equal: Putting Fire, Harvest, and Fossil Fuel Emissions in Context” by K.J. Bartowitz, et al., Frontiers for Global Change, 2022.
“While the primary goal is fire risk reduction, these policies have been interpreted as strategies that can be used to save trees from being killed by fire, thus preventing carbon emissions and feedbacks to climate warming. This interpretation has already resulted in cutting down trees that likely would have survived fire, resulting in forest carbon losses that are greater than if
a wildfire had occurred.”
“Combustion of Aboveground Wood from Live Trees in Megafires, CA, USA” by Mark E. Harmon, et al., Forests, 2022
“The end result in the forests we examined is that even very severe fires combust <2% of live aboveground woody biomass on average.”
“Meeting GHG reduction targets requires accounting for all forest sector emissions” by Tara W Hudiburg, Beverly E Law, William R Moomaw, Mark E Harmon, Jeffrey E Stenzel, Environmental Research Letters, 2019
“We find that Western US forests are net sinks because there is a positive net balance of forest carbon uptake exceeding losses due to harvesting, wood product use, and combustion by wildfire. However, over 100 years of wood product usage is reducing the potential annual sink by an average of 21%, suggesting forest carbon storage can become more effective in climate mitigation through reduction in harvest, longer rotations, or more efficient wood product usage. Of the ∼10 700 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents removed from west coast forests since 1900, 81% of it has been returned to the atmosphere or deposited in landfills. Moreover, state and federal reporting have erroneously excluded some product-related emissions, resulting in 25%–55% underestimation of state total CO2 emissions. For states seeking to reach GHG reduction mandates by 2030, it is important that state CO2 budgets are effectively determined or claimed reductions will be insufficient to mitigate climate change.”
“Attribution of net carbon change by disturbance type across forest lands of the conterminous United States” by N. L. Harris, S. C. Hagen, S. S. Saatchi, T. R. H. Pearson, C. W. Woodall, G. M. Domke, B. H. Braswell, B. F. Walters, S. Brown, W. Salas, A. Fore & Y. Yu, Carbon Balance and Management, 2016
“We estimated net C losses from six separate disturbance processes: fire, insect infestation, wind, timber harvest, land use conversion, and drought. C losses from harvest (162 ± 9.9 Tg C year) were more than five times higher than losses from all other processes combined (30 ± 2.6 Tg C year).
[Table 4: Logging emits 10 times more Carbon than wildfire and insects combined]
“Interactive Effects of Environmental Change and Management
Strategies on Regional Forest Carbon Emissions” by Tara W. Hudiburg, Sebastiaan Luyssaert, Peter E. Thornton, Beverly E. Law, Environmental Science and Technology, 2013
“To test the response to new harvesting strategies, repeated thinnings were applied in areas susceptible to fire to reduce mortality, and two clear-cut rotations were applied in productive forests to provide biomass for wood products and bioenergy. The management strategies examined here lead to long-term increased carbon emissions over current harvesting practices…”
“Can fuel-reduction treatments really increase forest carbon storage in the western US by reducing future fire emissions?” by J.L Campbell, M.E. Harmon, and S.R. Mitchell, Frontiers in Ecology and Environment, 2012.
“Our review reveals high C losses associated with fuel treatment, only modest differences in the combustive losses associated with high-severity fire and the low-severity fire that fuel treatment is meant to encourage, and a low likelihood that treated forests will be exposed to fire.”
“[I]t appears unlikely that forest fuel-reduction treatments have the additional benefit of increasing terrestrial C storage simply by reducing future combustive losses and
that, more often, treatment would result in a reduction in C stocks over space and time. Claims that fuel-reduction treatments reduce overall forest C emissions are generally not supported by first principles, modeling simulations, or empirical observations.”
“Assessing crown fire potential in coniferous forests of western North America: A critique of current approaches and recent simulation studies” by M.G. Cruz, M.E. Alexander, International Journal of Wildland Fire, 2010
“Simulation studies that use certain fire modelling systems (i.e. NEXUS, FlamMap, FARSITE, FFE-FVS (Fire and Fuels Extension to the Forest Vegetation Simulator), Fuel Management Analyst (FMAPlus), BehavePlus) based on separate implementations or direct integration of Rothermel’s surface and crown rate of fire spread models with Van Wagner’s crown fire transition and propagation models are shown to have a significant underprediction bias when used in assessing potential crown fire behaviour in conifer forests of western North America… The use of uncalibrated custom fuel models to represent surface fuelbeds is a fourth potential source of bias.”
A Synthesis of the Science on Forests and Carbon for U.S. Forests, by Michael Ryan, Mark Harmon, et al., Ecological Society of America, 2010
“Forests play an important role in the U.S. and global carbon cycle, and carbon sequestered by U.S. forest growth and harvested wood products currently offsets 12-19% of U.S. fossil fuel emissions.”
“Forest Fire Impacts on Carbon Uptake, Storage, and Emission: The Role of Burn Severity in the Eastern Cascades, Oregon” by Garrett W. Meigs, Daniel C. Donato, John L. Campbell, Jonathan G. Martin, Beverly E. Law, Ecosystems, 2009
“Stand-scale C combustion varied with burn severity…and a study-wide average live tree stem consumption of 1.24%.”
“Public land, timber harvests, and climate mitigation: Quantifying carbon sequestration potential on U.S. public timberlands” by Brooks M. Depro, Brian C. Murray, Ralph J. Alig, Alyssa Shanks, Forest Ecology and Management, 2008
“In the United States, terrestrial carbon sequestration in private and public forests offsets approximately 11% of all GHG emissions from all sectors of the economy on an annual basis.”
“Our analysis found that a “no timber harvest” scenario eliminating harvests on public lands would result in an annual increase of 17–29 million metric tonnes of carbon (MMTC) per year between 2010 and 2050—as much as a 43% increase over current sequestration levels on public timberlands and would offset up to 1.5% of total U.S. GHG emissions.”
“In contrast, moving to a more intense harvesting policy…may result in annual carbon losses of 27–35 MMTC per year between 2010 and 2050. These losses would represent a significant decline (50–80%) in anticipated carbon sequestration associated with the existing timber harvest policies.”
“Pyrogenic carbon emission from a large wildfire in Oregon, United States” by J. Campbell, D. Donato, D. Azuma, B. Law, Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences, 2007
“Combustion factors were highest for litter, duff, and foliage, lowest for live woody pools.”
[Table 3,4: 2-3% of Carbon released from trees]
“Fire Severity in mechanically thinned versus unthinned forests of the Sierra Nevada, California” by Chad T Hanson, Dennis C Odion, Proceedings of the 3rd International Fire Ecology and Management Congress, 2006
“In all seven sites, combined mortality [thinning and fire] was higher in thinned than in unthinned units. In six of seven sites, fire-induced mortality was higher in thinned than in unthinned units…Mechanical thinning increased fire severity on the sites currently available for study on national forests of the Sierra Nevada.”
“Are wildfire mitigation and restoration of historic forest structure compatible? A spatial modeling assessment” by R.V. Platt, et al., Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2006
“Compared with the original conditions, a closed canopy would result in a 10 percent reduction in the area of high or extreme fireline intensity. In contrast, an open canopy [from thinning] has the opposite effect, increasing the area exposed to high or extreme fireline intensity by 36 percent. Though it may appear counterintuitive, when all else is equal open canopies lead to reduced fuel moisture and increased midflame windspeed, which increase potential fireline intensity.”
“Microclimate in Forest Ecosystem and Landscape Ecology: Variations in local climate can be used to monitor and compare the effects of different management regimes” by Jiquan Chen, Sari C. Saunders, Thomas R. Crow, Robert J. Naiman, Kimberley D. Brosofske, Glenn D. Mroz, Brian L. Brookshire, Jerry F. Franklin, BioScience, 1999
“When moving from open forest areas, resulting from logging, and into dense forests with high canopy cover, “there is generally a decrease in daytime summer temperatures but an increase in humidity…”
“The authors reported a 5 [degree] C difference in ambient air temperature between a closed-canopy mature forest and a forest with partial cutting, like a commercial thinning unit (Fig. 4b), and noted that such differences are even greater than the increases in temperature predicted due to anthropogenic climate change.”
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