What’s the baseline? Carbon storage in a northern California mixed-conifer forest before fire suppression policies
Principal Investigator: John Battles, Ph.D.
Project Partners: Clarke Knight (graduate student researcher)
Institution: University of California, Berkeley
Project Type: Graduate Student
Grant Award #8GG18800
Amount awarded: $60,527
Award Date: September 2019
Status: Complete
My goal is to understand the impacts of disturbance on forest carbon cycling and to develop a baseline of forest conditions for Six Rivers National Forest, a high-priority landscape. Specifically, I will test the hypothesis that under the pre-settlement fire regime of frequent fire, the mixed conifer forests in the Klamath Mountains, stored less carbon in live tree biomass than under the current altered fire regime. By integrating paleo and modern data, I will quantify a long-term record (1000+ years) of the interactions between the fire regime and biomass storage in the mixed conifer forest.
Knight CA, Cogbill CV, Potts MD, Wanket JA, Battles JJ (2020) Settlement-era forest structure and composition in the Klamath Mountains: Reconstructing a historical baseline. Ecosphere 11:e03250.
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.3250
Knight, C.A., L. Anderson, M. J. Bunting, M. Champagne, R. M. Clayburn, J. N. Crawford, A. Klimaszewski-Patterson, E. E. Knapp, F. K. Lake, S.A. Mensing, D. Wahl, J. Wanket, A. Watts-Tobin, M. D. Potts, J. J. Battles. 2022. Land management explains major trends in forest structure and composition over the past 3000 years in California’s Klamath Mountains. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 199: e2116264119.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2116264119
Press release for Knight et al. 2022
https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/03/14/how-indigenous-burning-shaped-the-klamaths-forests-for-a-millennia/
Contact Information
John Battles
jbattles@berkeley.edu
510-643-0684
Clarke Knight
cknight@usgs.gov
650-329-4540
https://www.usgs.gov/staff-profiles/clarke-knight
CAL FIRE Forest Health Research Program
FHResearch@fire.ca.gov