No recovery of soil respiration four years after fire and post-fire management in a Nordic boreal forest

Abstract

The long-term carbon storage capacity of the boreal forest is under threat from the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires. In addition to the direct carbon emissions during a fire, the burnt forest often turns into a net carbon emitter after fire, leading to large additional losses of carbon over several years. Understanding how quickly forests recover after a fire is therefore vital to predicting the effects of fire on the forest carbon balance. We present soil respiration and CH₄ fluxes, soil chemistry, microclimate and vegetation survey data from the first four years after a wildfire in a Pinus sylvestris forest in Sweden. This is an understudied part of the boreal biome where forest management decisions interact with disturbances to affect forest growth. We analysed how fire severity and post-fire salvage-logging affected soil carbon fluxes. The fire did not affect soil CH₄ uptake. However, soil respiration was significantly affected by the presence or absence of living trees after the fire and post-fire forest management. Tree mortality due to the high-severity fire, or the salvage-logging of living trees after low-severity fire, led to immediate and significant decreases in soil respiration. Salvage-logging of dead trees after high-severity fire did not alter soil respiration compared to when the dead trees were left standing. However, it did significantly slow the regrowth of understory vegetation. Our results highlight that the impact of salvage-logging on the soil carbon fluxes depends on fire severity but that logging always slows the natural recovery of vegetation after fire. The soil CO₂ fluxes did not show signs of recovery at any of the burnt sites during the first four years since the fire.