Forest Carbon Sinks: Fluxes and Storage Capacity

Forests are central to the Earth’s carbon balance, serving as the largest terrestrial carbon sinks and removing approximately one-fifth of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions annually. Their ability to store and sequester carbon underpins global climate mitigation strategies. However, the accelerating pace of global change—marked by warming temperatures, altered precipitation regimes, and an increase in extreme events such as droughts, wildfires, and insect outbreaks—poses significant threats to the stability and persistence of forest carbon sinks. Recent evidence suggests that the efficiency of terrestrial carbon sinks is declining, with alarming sink-to-source transitions observed in tropical forests across Southeast Asia and South America. Despite advances in remote sensing, modeling, and isotopic tracing techniques, considerable uncertainty remains about how interacting stressors influence carbon dynamics, ecosystem resilience, and feedbacks to the global climate system. Addressing these knowledge gaps requires interdisciplinary approaches that link observations, experiments, and modeling frameworks across scales.

This Research Topic aims to enhance our understanding of how global change—encompassing climate variability, land-use transformations, and altered disturbance regimes—affects the structure, function, and long-term carbon sequestration potential of forests. It seeks to quantify how different drivers shape carbon fluxes and storage capacities, assess the resilience and recovery potential of forest ecosystems, and refine predictive models of carbon-climate feedbacks. The goal is to provide an integrated knowledge base to support national and global strategies for forest management, conservation, and carbon accounting under changing environmental scenarios.

To gather further insights into forest carbon dynamics under global change, we welcome contributions examining processes across diverse ecosystems, timescales, and methodological approaches. Studies may adopt empirical, experimental, modeling, or theoretical perspectives. This Research Topic invites articles focusing, but not limited, to the following themes:

• Long-term effects of temperature and precipitation changes on forest carbon uptake and storage

• Impacts of extreme climatic events, including droughts and heatwaves, on carbon sink stability

• Roles of natural disturbances—such as wildfires, insect outbreaks, and disease—in altering forest carbon balances

• Advances in monitoring and modeling forest carbon sinks using ground observations, remote sensing, and integrated datasets

• Ecological, economic, and hydrological implications of climate change for forest systems

• Applications of stable and radioactive isotopes for tracing carbon allocation, turnover, and sink-source dynamics

• Biodiversity shifts, plant-soil feedbacks, and ecosystem adaptation in response to global environmental change

Appendix: We welcome original research, reviews, methodological papers, and data reports that address these themes from local to global perspectives.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Global Change, Forest Carbon Sink, Carbon Dynamics, Climate Change Mitigation, Natural Climate Solutions, Forest Disturbance

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.