Carbon emissions and radiative forcings from tundra wildfires in the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta, Alaska
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Tundra environments are experiencing elevated levels of wildfire, and the frequency is expected to keep increasing due to accelerating climate change in the Arctic. Tundra wildfires can release globally significant amounts of greenhouse gasses that influence the Earth’s radiative balance. Here we develop a novel method for estimating carbon loss and the resulting radiative forcings of gaseous and aerosol emissions from 2015 tundra wildfires in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta (YKD), AK. We paired burn depth measurements using two vegetative reference points that survived the fire event —Sphagnum fuscum and Dicranum spp.— with measurements of local organic matter and soil carbon properties to estimate total ecosystem organic matter and carbon loss. We used remotely-sensed data of fire severity from Landsat 8 to scale our measured losses to the entire fire-affected area, with an estimated total loss of 2.04 Tg of organic matter and 0.91 Tg of carbon, and an average loss of 3.76 kg m-2 of organic matter and 1.68 kg m-2 of carbon in the 2015 YKD wildfires. To demonstrate the impact of these fires on Earth’s radiation budget, we developed a simple but comprehensive framework to estimate the radiative forcing from Arctic wildfires. We synthesized existing research on the lifetime and radiative forcings of gaseous and aerosol emissions of CO2, N2O, CH4, O3 and its precursors, and fire aerosols. The model shows a net positive cumulative mean radiative forcing of 3.67 W m-2 using RCP 4.5 and 3.37 W m-2 using RCP 8.5 at 80 years post-fire, which was dominated by CO2 emissions. Our results highlight the climate impact of tundra wildfires, which positively reinforce climate warming and increased fire frequency through the radiative forcings of their gaseous emissions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".