Post-fire landscape.
Sasha Wagner has teamed up with principal investigator Margaret Zimmer, a University of California Santa Cruz hydrologist who had been studying the path of water starting from rainfall on a hillside in Blue Oak reserve. Zimmer’s lab equipped the hillside with multiple instruments, including sensors that detect and measure the flow of water, and automated sample collecting equipment. A wildfire burned through the site in August 2020, but the instruments were resurrected with minor repairs, and researchers are now anticipating the first rainfall to follow the fire.
“What we call the ‘first flush’ of carbon and nutrients from the land after a wildfire has never been captured before,” said Wagner. “So what’s in that first flush? When does it get to the ocean? Is the fraction of black carbon that arrives in the ocean more or less reactive than what was flushed from the landscape? Part of filling in these gaps on this aspect of the carbon cycle requires us to track black carbon from the headwaters through the larger branches of the river into coastal environments.”
With mountains that drain directly into the sea, southern California is the perfect location for a clean track of the connection between charring on the landscape and the ocean. And by combining organic geochemical analysis with hydrological analysis, the research will create an informed picture of how black carbon is moving from the hillside overland or into groundwater. “These kinds of connections are really important in telling the story of what’s happening in streams, extrapolating more broadly to what’s happening in other areas, and also making predictions should a wildfire happen again,” Wagner said.
Read the full Rensselaer News article here: “West Coast Wildfires Create Rare Opportunity To Track Black Carbon” - Originally published by M. L. Martialay on 17 December 2020.
Project funding information: National Science Foundation – Hydrologic Sciences (EAR). RAPID: Collaborative Research: Hydrologically driven export of pyrogenic carbon and nutrients in fire-impacted watersheds. Award No. 2100269. M. Zimmer (PI), S. Wagner (CoI).
