"If you want a make these stands more stable, so they can survive these fires, and not make large carbon releases, you need to direct them so they start putting a lot of growth into the large pine trees, which are very fire resistant," North told me not long ago.
"People
generally believe that with fire suppression, you get all this in-filling, all
the stems are growing in there, that they would store more carbon - but we found
that's not the case," North added. "There is actually less carbon in the stands because you've
lost a lot of the big trees. So the small trees, you may have gazillions of
them, but it doesn't make up for the fact that you had more large trees in the
past."
So what do we do now with the Sierra climate warming and high-intensity, stand-destroying fire a growing threat?
"You need a combination of low-intensity thinning and prescribed burning," North said. "It's one of the great advantage we have in the Sierra: trees that are large and fairly old, if you release them, they actually start growing like a juvenile youngster again. They just start packing the carbon on. And we have the potential, if we pay this short-term penalty, to make the forests in the Sierra a substantial sink for carbon - and off-set the fossil fuel release underway with human activity."
But the Hurteau and North study also suggested California carbon accounting practices actually contribute to the problem by counting timber harvest stock loss as a carbon emission. "However, accounting for emissions from wildfire is not required," it says. "Current carbon accounting practices can be at odds with efforts to reduce fire intensity in many western U.S. forest types."
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