BUSCADOR RECOLECTA

Digital.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC

oai:digital.csic.es:10261/364329

© 2024 The Author(s). Global Change Biology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited., Wildfires directly emit 2.1 Pg carbon (C) to the atmosphere annually. The net effect of wildfires on the C cycle, however, involves many interacting source and sink processes beyond these emissions from combustion. Among those, the role of post-fire enhanced soil organic carbon (SOC) erosion as a C sink mechanism remains essentially unquantified. Wildfires can greatly enhance soil erosion due to the loss of protective vegetation cover and changes to soil structure and wettability. Post-fire SOC erosion acts as a C sink when off-site burial and stabilization of C eroded after a fire, together with the on-site recovery of SOC content, exceed the C losses during its post-fire transport. Here we synthesize published data on post-fire SOC erosion and evaluate its overall potential to act as longer-term C sink. To explore its quantitative importance, we also model its magnitude at continental scale using the 2017 wildfire season in Europe. Our estimations show that the C sink ability of SOC water erosion during the first post-fire year could account for around 13% of the C emissions produced by wildland fires. This indicates that post-fire SOC erosion is a quantitatively important process in the overall C balance of fires and highlights the need for more field data to further validate this initial assessment., Antonio Girona-García is recipient of the Grant RYC2021-031262-I funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR”; and was also funded by the Spanish Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC) through the project 20208AT007. Stefan Doerr was supported by Natural Environment Research Council grant UK-FDRS (NE/T003553/1) and the project FirEURisk, funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 101003890., Peer reviewed