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.