The study shows that old-growth forests store 78–89 percent more carbon than managed forests in living trees, dead wood and soil, down to a depth of 60 centimeters. The difference is significantly larger than previous estimates and is mainly due to the large amounts of carbon stored in the soil in old-growth forests - a result that surprised the researchers.
"The soil carbon stock there is as large as all the carbon in managed forests - trees, dead wood and soil combined," says Anders Ahlström, researcher at the Department of Environmental and Geosciences at Lund University, in a press release.
During the study, published in the journal Science, fieldwork was carried out across the country, where 220 soil pits were dug to measure carbon storage.
