Logging and Burning Trees May Remove 54 Million Tons of Carbon from the Forest

How much does logging contribute to the loss of carbon? It turns out that it impacts Amazonia quite a bit. Scientists have found that logging and burning could be removing nearly 54 million tons of carbon from the forest each year and introduce it to the atmosphere as greenhouse gases.

The researchers combined satellite imagery with field study and conducted a pixel-by-pixel assessment regarding what has happened over the past 20 years. In all, they studied 225 plots in two large regions in an area measuring 3 million hectares.

"The impacts of timber extraction, burning and fragmentation have received little notice because all the efforts have been focused on preventing further deforestation," said Erika Berenguer, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This attitude has resulted in tremendous progress in conserving the Brazilian Amazon, whose deforestation rate fell more than 70 percent over the past 10 years. However, our study has shown that this other type of degradation is having a severe impact on the forest, with enormous quantities of previously stored carbon being lost into the atmosphere."

In fact, the researchers found that the forests that were disturbed by logging or fire had from 18 percent to 57 percent less carbon than primary forests. The scientists also found that one area of primary forest ended up having more than 300 tons of carbon per hectare, while areas of forests that had been burned or subjected to extraction had, at most, 200 tons per hectare.

The findings reveal how human activities can have a major impact on the amount of carbon forests can store. This, in turn, reveals a possible way to store carbon; by reducing these activities, it may be possible to reduce the amount of carbon that makes its way into our atmosphere.

The findings are published in the journal Global Change Biology.