Abstract
Wildfires release the greatest amount of carbon into the atmosphere compared to other forest disturbances. To understand how current and potential future fire regimes may affect the role of the Eurasian boreal forest in the global carbon cycle, we employed a new, spatially-explicit fire module DISTURB-F (DISTURBance-Fire) in tandem with a spatially-explicit, individually-based gap dynamics model SIBBORK (SIBerian BOReal forest simulator calibrated to Krasnoyarsk Region). DISTURB-F simulates the effect of forest fire on the boreal ecosystem, namely the mortality of all or only the susceptible trees (loss of biomass, i.e., carbon) within the forested landscape. The fire module captures some important feedbacks between climate, fire and vegetation structure. We investigated the potential climate-driven changes in the fire regime and vegetation in middle and south taiga in central Siberia, a region with extensive boreal forest and rapidly changing climate. The output from this coupled simulation can be used to estimate carbon losses from the ecosystem as a result of fires of different sizes and intensities over the course of secondary succession (decades to centuries). Furthermore, it may be used to assess the post-fire carbon storage capacity of potential future forests, the structure and composition of which may differ significantly from current Eurasian boreal forests due to regeneration under a different climate.
Highlights
Chapin et al [1] define a “disturbance” as a period of time during which the ecosystem loses carbon
Over the timeframe of centuries to millennia, forest ecosystems, disturbance regimes and atmospheric carbon concentrations acquire a steady state, within which the carbon losses from the ecosystem are balanced by the carbon sequestered and stored by the ecosystem [2]
In order to understand how the boreal ecosystem may be contributing to the global carbon budget in the near future, it is important to estimate how far from the steady state this system is being displaced by the changes in the fire regime and the associated biomass losses from these forests
Summary
Chapin et al [1] define a “disturbance” as a period of time during which the ecosystem loses carbon. The regeneration process of forests post disturbance events, such as wildfire, is likely to be different under warmer, drier conditions and may even lead to biome shifts, potentially increasing the fire danger in the region (such as with a shift from forest to steppe) and decreasing carbon storage (biomass) In this manner, climate change has direct and indirect effects on forest structure and composition through effects on physiological processes and disturbance regimes. SIBBORK has been calibrated to the southern taiga ecotone in central Siberia and has been validated against multidimensional datasets from southern, middle and northern taiga locations, including the mountainous region near the southernmost extent of the boreal forest [46,47] To date, it is the only individual-based vegetation model that has been able to accurately simulate the distribution of expositional forest steppe in the mountains of southern Siberia, based on accurate simulation of environmental conditions on the specified landscape. The tandem SIBBORK-DISTURB-F platform can be re-parameterized to other forest ecosystems and fire regimes
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