International Research Fellowship Program: Fire Management and Carbon Storage in Spain and the U.S.

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0202514KayeThe International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.This award will support a six-month research fellowship by Dr. Jason Kaye to work with Dr. Ramon Vallejo at the Centro de Estudios Ambientales del Mediterraneo (CEAM) in Valencia, Spain over a period of 36 months.The objective of this project is to quantify the effects of fire and fire management on carbon storage in eastern Spain and the southwestern United States. Both of these regions contain dry forests that supported frequent fires prior to human management (millennia ago in Spain, a century ago in the U.S.). Contemporary fire suppression facilitates tree establishment, carbon storage, and fuel accumulation. In Spain, this accumulated fuel eventually burns in stand-replacing fires that convert plant material to atmospheric CO2. In the U.S., fire suppression is more effective and most forests have not burned for a century. Thus, these regions contain complementary information regarding fire-based CO2 emissions. The Spanish ecosystems provide information on CO2 released from forests experiencing repeated stand-replacing fires. The U.S. ecosystems provide information on CO2 stored in forests when fire is persistently suppressed. To measure carbon accumulation following stand-replacing fires in eastern Spain, the PI will locate forests that have burned at different times in the past and measure the total amount of carbon in each ecosystem. The rate of carbon accumulation can be calculated from the age and carbon content of each forest. To measure carbon accumulation following fire suppression in the U.S., the PI will use tree-ring reconstructions of past forest density and mass. Tree-rings represent an annual record of tree size that can be converted into carbon storage. The main results from this research will be equations describing the accumulation of carbon in dry forests following fire suppression and stand replacing fires. These equations will rapidly be incorporated into global carbon models.Dr. Vallejo has been studying fire in this region for 25 years. He has on-going projects with researchers in the European Union, which will enable interactions with international carbon and fire scientists. Dr. Vallejo has already established research sites that are ideally suited for the carbon sampling outlined above.