Carbon Could Be Locked in Forests

Argonne researchers have found that in the next 100 years, already existing reforestation in the country could help topsoil absorb an additional 2 billion tons of carbon.

Replanting trees after events like last year's catastrophic Western wildfires not only is critical to forest recovery, but could actually help soils take up more carbon from the atmosphere than if the burned areas were just left idle or cultivated.

That's according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) coauthored by Umakant Mishra -- a geospatial scientist in the Environmental Science division of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory -- and six other researchers from across the country.  The goal of their study was to determine how much carbon is absorbed, or sequestered, in the topsoils of reforested areas compared with pristine forest and disturbed land.  The researchers found that in the next 100 years, already existing reforestation in the country could help topsoil absorb an additional 2 billion tons of carbon, which is about 1 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

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