Abstract
Wildfire is a major disturbance of terrestrial carbon cycling, yet its effects on functionally distinct soil carbon pools remain poorly resolved at the global scale. Here, we synthesize 210 studies (1,050 observations) to quantify wildfire-induced changes in particulate organic carbon (POC) and mineral-associated organic carbon (MAOC) in surface soil (to 25 cm depth). Wildfire significantly reduced both fractions, with disproportionately larger losses in POC ( − 24.0%) compared to MAOC ( − 9.5%), indicating greater vulnerability of labile carbon pools relative to mineral-stabilized carbon. Temporal analyses reveal that carbon losses do not peak immediately after wildfire but intensify over the first two decades (~20–25 years), followed by gradual recovery, highlighting prolonged post-wildfire ecosystem adjustment. Across sites, the magnitude of carbon loss is primarily controlled by initial soil carbon content, climate, and time since wildfire. Scaling these responses globally, we estimate cumulative wildfire-induced soil organic carbon losses of 885.92 ± 12.75 Tg between 1997 and 2023. Our findings demonstrate that wildfire induces persistent, fraction-specific destabilization of soil carbon, underscoring the critical need for global carbon–climate models to explicitly represent distinct particulate and mineral-associated carbon dynamics to accurately project future land–atmosphere feedbacks under intensifying fire regimes.
Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks are due to all three reviewers and the editor for their close reading of the article and valuable suggestions. We also thank Prof. Kajar Köster (University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland) for the language refinement of this text, and the Key Laboratory of Sustainable Forest Ecosystem Management–Ministry of Education and the National Innovation Alliance of Wildland Fire Prevention and Control Technology of China for supporting this research.
Funding
This research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation (No. 32471868), Forestry and Grassland Science and Technology Innovation and Achievement Promotion Project (2026132004).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Transparent Peer Review file (download PDF )
Supplementary Information (download DOCX )
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hu, T., Wang, C., Zhou, Z. et al. Wildfire drives persistent and disproportionate losses of particulate relative to mineral-associated soil organic carbon.
Commun Earth Environ (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-04001-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-04001-0
Source: Ecology - nature.com
