Note the US Forest Service official’s quote at the end: smells like something’s afoot…
ASW
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“The findings run contrary to expectation. It was
thought that more trees meant more carbon being
drawn from the atmosphere. ‘If you suppress fires
and lots of little trees show up, then you ought
to store more carbon,’ says ecologist Richard
Houghton of the Woods Hole Research Center in
Falmouth, Massachusetts.”
—————————————————————
Nature
14 May 2008 doi:10.1038/news.2008.818
News
Forest-fire management ‘raises carbon emissions’
California study suggests fire-free forests store less carbon.
Quenching forest fires leads to more carbon in
the air, says new research carried out in
Californian forests. The discovery suggests that
forests spared from fire may release more of the
greenhouse gas into the air than they absorb.
Decades of suppressing natural fires has
increased the number of surviving trees in
California’s forests. But this growth has been at
the expense of larger trees, which are less
resilient to drought and other stresses than
smaller, younger trees, resulting in a decline in
the total amount of carbon stored in these
forests.