Burial of downed dead wood is strongly affected by log attributes, forest ground vegetation, edaphic conditions, and climate zones

Dead wood can represent a substantial portion of forest ecosystem carbon stocks and it is often reported following good practice guidance associated with national greenhouse gas inventories. In high latitude forest ecosystems a substantial proportion of downed dead wood is overgrown by ground vegetation and buried in the humus layer. Such burial obfuscates the important process of transfer to other pools such as litter and soil, and emission of carbon associated with dead wood (i.e., rates of decay) . Using data from the Swedish National Forest Inventory, we found that the proportion of downed logs that is buried increased from temperate to boreal forests. Several factors affect the probability of burial, including log properties (e.g., decay class), ground vegetation (e.g., moss dominance, type of moss cover), and edaphic conditions (e.g., soil type, depth of organic layer). Combined assessments suggest that about 24 % of the carbon in the above-ground downed dead wood pool was buried in boreal forests. Dead wood burial has important implications for forest carbon dynamics and associated monitoring (e.g., United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change reporting) as buried wood typically decomposes much slower compared to above-ground dead wood.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author