Research Article Open Access Fuel Loading and the Potential for Carbon Emissions from Fire Following Two Shelterwood Harvest Treatments in Southern Ohio

This article was first published in Genomics and Applied Biology (Regular Print Version), and here was authorized to redistribute under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Preferred citation for this article: Tao et al., 2010, Fuel Loading and the potential for carbon emissions from fire following two shelterwood harvest treatments in Southern Ohio, Genomics and Applied Biology,29(4): 628-638 (doi: 10.3969/gab.29.000628) Abstract The purpose of this paper is to report the fuel load following shelterwood harvest of two intensities (70 % residual stocking and 50 % residual stocking), the total carbon content contained in these fuels, and the potential carbon emissions from fire. And the fuel load includes forest litter, woody and herbaceous plants and dead wood. The research results show that the forest litter and the woody plants display significantly greater carbon content than herbaceous plants. The forest litter represents 36.6%, 50.9% and 66.0 % of the total fuel load for the 50 % treatment, 70 % treatment and control respectively. Coarse woody debris accounts for 58.4%, 48.0%and 32.6 % of the total fuel load for the 50 % treatment, 70 % treatment and control respectively. Small woody and herbaceous materials contribute very little to the fuel loading in all treatments. The total fuel loading was determined to be 54.07 t/ha, 41.98 t/ha and 20.73 t/ha for the 50 % treatment, 70 % treatment, and the control, respectively. If all these fuels were consumed in a wildfire, it is estimated that the total carbon compound emissions from a fire would be 90.39 t/ha, 70.19 t/ha, and 34.66 t/ha, in th