These findings suggest wildfires may result in larger carbon losses from land than expected, especially when scaled over the vast areas of forest burned annually.
🚨 Important for climate change 🚨

Grateful for support from NRCan, NSERC, and the ERC. 3/3

Using a natural experiment pairing burned and unburned forests, we found wildfire increased carbon concentrations in headwater streams by nearly 30%.

This carbon was as favourable for microbial degradation as that in unburned streams!🦠 2/n

These findings indicate that the ocean plays a larger role in long-term terrestrial carbon sequestration than previously appreciated and call for a reassessment of global carbon budgets and models. 🌊🌏 3/3

Using novel analytical chemistry approaches, we identify new markers of terrestrial carbon. We estimate that the terrestrial contribution to the oceanic carbon pool may be several times larger than recognised. 2/3

Cannot thank NRCan enough! They should join the Bluesky party 😊

None of this work would have been possible without the leadership of @ecfreewoman.bsky.social, colleagues @waterik.bsky.social @icbm-uol.bsky.social, many field assistants, and funders @gatescambridge.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu 7/7 🙏

Wood is touted as climate neutral, but is it? 🌳

Our study revises downward carbon storage in wood and suggest we must improve practices to make logging sequester carbon. These effects are likely playing out over millions of hectares of hemiboreal forests globally 🌎 6/n

What really matters is the reactivity of this carbon!

We found that carbon was more available for microbes to use by introducing new molecules from fresh plant material and disturbed soils. These changes lasted for >2 years. 5/n

We tracked four forests in Canada before and after logging for 3 years. We found that about 6% of all carbon in harvested trees would be lost to streams by logging. Although small, this number is large enough to make logging carbon neutral or even a carbon sink. 4/n

Logging can result in as much soil carbon washing into waters as 1/5 of all forest growth! However, we tend to think that logging is a good natural climate solution to capture CO2 from the atmosphere. Once in water, carbon can even be more likely to return to the atmosphere. 3/n

We know that soil carbon is not one homogenous thing. 🧪 It consists of thousands of different molecules, each with different function (see www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...). As it rains, this carbon is washed from soils into waterways. 2/n

Headwaters provide key habitat for fish like the beautiful brook trout. The work we are leading will help inform forest management plans to protect headwaters and their many benefits in a changing climate. 🌲 🐟