Soil carbon sequestration by Holocene fires inferred from soil charcoal in the dry French Alps

The current global carbon budget has a missing sink, which is believed to be in terrestrial ecosystems. At least one carbon sink, wood charcoal sequestrated in soil, remains poorly detailed. We estimate the wood charcoal-carbon content in soils located in dry valleys within the French Alps. Soils were sampled at five sites along altitudinal transects, from the conifer-dominated subalpine forests to the alpine grasslands. The five sites were distributed along a bioclimatic and biogeographic gradient from the southern Mediterranean to the northern continental Alps. The altitudinal distribution of charcoal exhibits the same pattern in the five sites, despite stand fire history, and regional bioclimatic and biogeographic differences. Charcoal concentrations are low (0.01 to 10 g(char) m(-2)) in soils from the current treeless belt. while soils at lower elevation show high concentrations (10 to 2000 g(char) m(-2)). The results suggest that the landscape structure determine the charcoal accumulation throughout variability of vegetation type and fire frequency. Charcoal concentrations recorded in the subalpine belt in the Alps are similar to those of Swedish boreal forests, but are 10 to 100 times lower than values from Mediterranean ecosystems. Dry to subhumid ecosystems contain subfossil carbon in the form of charcoal, which should be explicitly taken into account in the global carbon budget.