Johan Eckdahl

My primary affiliations are the University of California, Berkeley and the Western Forest & Fire Resilience Collaborative where I am investigating the resilience of forests to wildfire and climate change across the western United States.

I continue as an affiliate researcher at Lund University on several large projects regarding wildfire, carbon cycling and climate change in Swedish forests:

• Acquiring high-precision measurements of the production and movement of pyrogenic carbon through land and waterways using controlled burns.
• Calibrating dendrological and sediment records to modern fire activity to assess the long-term carbon sequestration potential of wildfires.
• Experimentally evaluating drivers of climate-induced forest transitions and the role of plant biodiversity in early post-fire carbon recapture.
• Estimating the long-term impacts of fire on forest carbon storage under contemporary management and environmental conditions (proposal in review).

Please feel free to reach out regarding ideas for collaboration, outreach or general scientific discussion.

Previous Forest Fire Research at Lund University

At Lund University I established and continue to manage a network of 50 separate wildfires and 50 matched unburnt control areas occurring across the near climatic extent of Sweden’s boreal forests during the extreme fire season of 2018. This network has produced an abundance of field data covering multiple metrics of fire severity and their relation to microbial and plant community interactions with carbon and nutrient cycling.  Publications derived from the effort have offered strong support for the following:

1. Climate is important for determining forest fuel characteristics and interacts with wildfire to determine carbon and nitrogen emissions as well as its restructuring in residual forest material. Notably, the N-preserving characteristics of the boreal Eurasian fire regimes appears to be enhanced by mean annual temperature, resulting in greatly reduced C:N in warmer burnt soils. Read more here.  
2. Climate interacts synergistically with wildfire to restructure forests in ways that determine recovering microbial community composition and associated rates of nutrient mobilization. Reduced soil C:N and the replacement of boreal fungi with nutrient mobilizing bacterial decomposers are important for stimulating transition towards faster growing, more temperate vegetation under regional warming. Read more here.
3. Enhancements in net primary production will likely not keep pace with increased soil decomposition under warming due to restrictions on plant community turnover and resulting biodiversity limitations. This can present significant delays in the return of burnt forests to carbon sinks, shifting carbon balance to the atmosphere. Read more here.

Also, read about the importance of subterranean wildfire mobilization of carbon here and a general background to boreal wildfire biogeochemical cycling here.

Early Work

I began research working with several large collaborations including MAX IV and CERN, focused on developing detector and robotic automation capabilities for synchrotron and particle physics experiments.  As a previous outdoor guide where I grew up in California, I continue on with the desire to share all the cool and nice things I’ve found out about the world with others around.