Hotter, larger fires turning boreal forest into carbon source: research
Aug 21, 2019 | 11:38 AM
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Research suggests that bigger, hotter wildfires are turning Canada’s vast boreal forest into a source of climate-changing greenhouse gases.
Soil in the forest, which crosses six provinces and two territories, has long been considered a storehouse of carbon from centuries of growth and decay.
In old-growth forests, the carbon remains in the soil even after it is burned over.
But a new paper by scientists at four Canadian universities concludes that larger fires are burning through more of the old growth, making the overall forest younger.
