Every year, fire burns 5% of the planet’s land surface, and the soils in those areas hold roughly 70% of the world’s topsoil carbon. This project asks whether changing how we manage those fires—especially in drylands like savannas—could lock more carbon into the ground and slow climate change. The problem is that fire releases huge amounts of soil carbon into the atmosphere, but it also shapes how much carbon soils can store long-term. The balance is poorly understood, particularly in drylands, where more than 75% of global fire-driven carbon emissions occur and where fires are often set deliberately as prescribed burns. That controlled setting offers a rare opportunity to adjust fire regimes for carbon storage. The researcher will test this across 15 long-term fire experiment sites, some running for 65 years, then build a new model of carbon and nitrogen cycling in soils. Finally, the work will plug directly into a real carbon-credit marketplace in North America, quantifying how altered fire management on rangelands could generate verifiable carbon offsets. If successful, the project could turn a routine land-management tool into a practical, nature-based climate solution that also supports economic development.
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Soils may contain a vast capacity to sequester carbon and slow climate change when disturbances are managed. I aim to understand how fire management can impact soil carbon sequestration at the global scale using experimental tests of underlying mechanisms across a global network of fire experiments, development of process-based models, and implementation into an active carbon-credit marketplace. Managing fire regimes to promote soil carbon (C) sequestration has the potential to be large, given that fire burns 5% of the globe annually and areas that burn account for ~70% of global topsoil C. More than 75% of these global fire-driven C emissions occurs in dryland ecosystems such as savannas, where fires are primarily caused by prescribed burns, not uncontrolled wildfires observed in forests, offering an opportunity to adjust fire management to sequester C. We will advance our understanding of how fire impacts soil C to understand the role of climate, plant productivity, and decomposition in regulating fire effects on soils, and how fire regimes can be managed to maximize soil C storage in drylands. First, I will systematically survey ecosystem C fluxes and storage across 15 sites that have manipulated fire frequencies for 30-65 years. Second, I will develop a model of C and nitrogen cycling and compare model outputs with historical models to understand how changes in soil stability modify fire effects on soils. Finally, I will address the applied topic of nature-based climate solutions to quantify potential C storage under altered fire management schemes in rangelands. The focus will be on North America because of the long-term and high-resolution datasets necessary for models and an ongoing collaboration with industry partners that run carbon credit purchasing programs. Combined, the three objectives aim to achieve a high-risk but high-reward goal of slowing climate change while supporting economic development.
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