Post-fire reforestation; securing climate-relevant carbon baseline data from soil and canopy to ecosystem scale
Description: Exceptionally dry and hot weather this summer resulted in the largest number of wildfires in Sweden in modern history. It has been suggested that such extreme wildfire seasons may become the ‘new normal’ under our warming climate not only in Sweden, but the boreal regions worldwide.Wildfires release vast amounts of greenhouse gases including carbon, however, as forests recover, this emitted carbon can be taken up again by the regrowing vegetation, returning forest to carbon sinks. For Swedish forests, little is known about how much greenhouse gases are released during and after fire, and which management approaches are most effective in re-establishing burnt forests from carbon sources to sinks.In collaboration with the Swedish Forest Agency and our team of leading Swedish and UK wildfire experts, we will be able to answer these questions by investigating Sweden’s largest wildfire of 2018. This will include monitoring burnt and unburnt areas and, for the first time also areas subjected to different post-fire management approaches.This project requires a rapid start as plots need to be established and data collection initiated before the first re-growing season and before the already ongoing harvesting is completed (05/2019). This allows addressing the questions above for the critical first year after the fire, and provides the necessary basis for securing sites and follow-on funding for longer-term monitoring through subsequent post-fire years.
Funder: Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas
Amount: SEK 1,991,000
Funding type: research
Funder scheme: Project grant
Start date: 2019-03-01
End date: 2019-12-31
Investigator: Natascha Kljun
Institution: Lund University
Funded outputs count: 8
Funder award ID: 2018-02700
OpenAlex ID: G1754326180