ORCHIDEE_Biochar

This version of ORCHIDEE has been used in Pyrogenic carbon mineralisation the missing link in the global grassland-dominated fire carbon budget by Simon P.K. Bowrin, Matthew W. Jones, Philippe Ciais, Bertrand Guenet, Samuel Abiven. Submitted to Nature Geoscience

Abstract

Biomass recovery after wildfires often approximates pre-disturbance conditions. However, fire legacy carbon (C) fluxes hitherto-overlooked in global modelling indicate that post-fire terrestrial C retention through pyrogenic C (PyC) production, and losses via multiple pathways, must be considered to quantify the global fire C balance. Here we attempt a first quantification of the fire C balance using a land surface model run over 1901-2010. Global PyC production drives a soil carbon accumulation of ~280 TgC yr-1 which is partially offset by several legacy C losses totalling ~190 TgC yr-1 for a partial residual sink of ~90 TgC yr-1, giving a first mechanistic constraint on maximum annual PyC mineralisation (89 TgCyr?-1) and a minimum PyC mean residence time of 5387 (1966-14100) yrs, assuming steady state. The residual is negative over forests and strongly positive over grassland-savannahs, suggesting contrasting roles of vegetation in the fire C cycle and the earth system. We were unable to mechanistically model PyC mineralisation due to a paucity of observational constraints, meaning that without assuming steady state, one cannot know the sign of the full fire C balance. Constraining PyC mineralisation rates is a critical research frontier for fire science, and would enable fuller understanding of fire’s role in the planetary C-cycle, with implications for attendant land use and conservation policies.

Code access

• See the version on the webinterface here : ​https://forge.ipsl.jussieu.fr/orchidee/browser/branches/publications/ORCHIDEE_Biochar
• Extract it on a terminal as follow, type anonymous as password:

  svn co --username anonymous svn://forge.ipsl.jussieu.fr/orchidee/branches/publications/ORCHIDEE_Biochar ORCHIDEE
  

Metadata

DOI
Creator	Simon Bowring
Affiliation	ENS
Title	ORCHIDEE_Biochar
Publisher	Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL)
PublicationYear	2018
ResourceType	Software
Rights	This software is distributed under the CeCILL license
rightsURI	​http://www.cecill.info/
Subject	Land surface model, Soil organic matter, carbon isotopes
DataManager	Karim Ramage (IPSL)
DataCurator	Josefine Ghattas (IPSL)
ContactPerson	Simon Bowring (ENS)
FundingReference