Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Fire history and woody debris

This graph shows the contribution of decaying CWD generated each year by wildfire to an overall estimate of the fire-generated CWD decomposition flux in Canada. (That is, each color shows the carbon flux from a different year's cohort, and the top line shows the estimated total flux.) No pre-1959 national statistics are available, so I've assumed a constant fire rate before then, equal to the 1959-1999 mean.

You can see how the low-fire 1970s resulted in a decline in the overall flux, but then in the 1980s and 1990s some big fire years raised the overall annual flux to around 50 Tg.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

From the department of unusual names

It's come to my attention that there's a tree canker named Neonectria fuckeliana. Question for my plant path friends: was this named by someone who was really pissed off at a woman named Eliana? Inquiring minds want to know!