To their alarm, the researchers also found that the forest is now undergoing a rapid transition.
And, as of February 2022, it looks like mortality may be reaching that level in what was the healthy forest in 2015.
Aguilos: We wanted to quantify how much carbon was stored in the soil and see how it has changed over time.
The deepest piece of wood came from a root system submerged within a layer of soil that has a profile indicating the site was formerly an upland forest.
The trees are dying; it’s converting into a shrub ecosystem in the near-term, but we think it’s going to become too wet for the shrubs, and at that point, it will become a marsh.
Wetlands only comprise a small fraction of the global land surface area, but contain about 21% of terrestrial carbon.