Wildfire drives a net decrease in forest live biomass across the Western United States

Abstract

It remains challenging to quantify recent changes in forest carbon due to lags in forest inventory measurements. The national U.S. forest inventory remeasures plots every five to ten years, so quantifying current carbon stocks using inventory data requires extrapolating from the last time plots were measured. We address this extrapolation challenge by fusing spatially explicit fire disturbance and canopy cover data from Landsat with forest inventory data using a statistical model. We produce annual estimates of live forest carbon across the Western U.S. from 2005 to 2022, and find that live forest biomass increased from 2005 to 2015, and then declined by 5% from 2015 to 2022 -- a signal missed by both official U.S. reporting and Earth system models. The trend reversal was driven primarily by increasing tree mortality from wildfire, and secondarily by slowing rates of carbon accumulation in undisturbed areas. Our results highlight the importance of accounting for rapidly changing disturbance regimes, and can help to improve jurisdictional carbon accounting and inform the extent to which federal and state climate mitigation strategies can rely on land to achieve net-zero emissions targets. Significance statementPolicy makers need to accurately and rapidly assess the status of the land carbon sink in order to make land management decisions and to assess progress towards climate commitments. However, lags in on-the-ground measurements make it challenging to do so, and it remains an open question whether Western U.S. forests are a net sink or a source of carbon. We fuse on-the-ground forest measurements with remote sensing data to show that live biomass is net declining in Western U.S. forests, and that this trend is driven primarily by increasing wildfire activity. This result challenges the idea that jurisdictions can rely on the land to offset fossil emissions, and supports tracking land carbon trends separately from fossil emissions inventories.