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Updated: Dec 23, 2025

Measuring and Mapping Patterns of Soil Erosion and Deposition Related to Soil Carbonate Concentrations Under Agricultural Management
Published on: September 12, 2017
Fire decline in dry tropical ecosystems enhances decadal land carbon sink
Yi Yin1,2, A Anthony Bloom3, John Worden4
1Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, 91125, USA. yiyin@caltech.edu.
Abstract:
The terrestrial carbon sink has significantly increased in the past decades, but the underlying mechanisms are still unclear. The current synthesis of process-based estimates of land and ocean sinks requires an additional sink of 0.6 PgC yr-1 in the last decade to explain the observed airborne fraction. A concurrent global fire decline was observed in association with tropical agriculture expansion and landscape fragmentation. Here we show that a decline of 0.2 ± 0.1 PgC yr-1 in fire emissions during 2008-2014 relative to 2001-2007 also induced an additional carbon sink enhancement of 0.4 ± 0.2 PgC yr-1 attributable to carbon cycle feedbacks, amounting to a combined sink increase comparable to the 0.6 PgC yr-1 budget imbalance. Our results suggest that the indirect effects of fire, in addition to the direct emissions, is an overlooked mechanism for explaining decadal-scale changes in the land carbon sink and highlight the importance of fire management in climate mitigation.
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