Burned landscape in the Santa Cruz Mountains (California).
In a new paper, Riley Barton and her co-authors show that black carbon export is primarily driven by hydrology, rather than percentage of drainage area burned, in coastal mountain rivers recently affected by wildfire. Fieldwork for this research was conducted in watersheds located within in the Santa Cruz Mountains (California, USA). At least a portion of each of these catchments was burned during the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fires.
Two different streams that were sampled for this study.
In California, wildfire frequency and severity has increased five-fold over the last four decades. Coastal fires are of particular concern as regional mountain rivers facilitate rapid and direct inputs of terrestrial carbon and nutrient subsidies to marine environments. This work confirms that catchment hydrology is a major variable and must be considered in future export models that predict relationships between terrestrial wildfire characteristics and post-burn carbon fluxes.
This work is entitled “Hydrology, rather than wildfire burn extent, determines post-fire organic and black carbon export from mountain rivers in central coastal California” and was published in the journal Limnology and Oceanography Letters.
