""Hemmorhaging": USGS: CA Federal Lands Were A Carbon Source In 12 Of The 17 Years Surveyed, Thanks Mostly To Fire
The ecosystems on the American Southwest’s federal lands are hemorrhaging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than any other region in the U.S., according to a recent study from the U.S. Geological Survey. While federal land ecosystems in most states are sequestering carbon dioxide on average, California’s lost six times more than any other state during the 17-year period from 2005 to 2021 that the study analyzed. “In California, it’s primarily a story of fire,” said Benjamin Sleeter, a research geographer with the USGS who led the ecosystem analysis in the new study.
While scientists typically expect the movement of carbon in and out of ecosystems to cancel out in the long run, human intervention and climate change have destabilized the delicate balance. It’s made the daunting task of modeling carbon flowing between ecosystems and the atmosphere, which has challenged scientists for decades, even harder.
“On long-term timescales, the terrestrial biosphere would be carbon neutral because there would only be so much carbon to go around,” said Anna Michalak, a carbon cycle researcher with Carnegie Science, a nonprofit research institute. But it's not so simple, she said, because “we’re digging up carbon that hasn’t been in circulation for millions of years, and we’re injecting that carbon into the atmosphere.”
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In five of the 17 years the USGS team analyzed, California’s federal lands acted as a carbon sink — not a source. For example, in 2019, the state experienced well over two times its average precipitation in many regions, boosting plant growth and, despite the devastating Kincade fire, had a relatively mild fire season. But just a year later, the state’s federal lands released more carbon than any other year in the study period due to a record-setting fire season that burned over 4 million acres and, according to the USGS study, emitted over 90 million tons of carbon dioxide on federal land alone.
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