Giving Compass' Take:

• Research shows younger plants in forests are able to extract carbon from the air and incorporate it into their biomass at a quicker rate than mature trees in rainforests, mainly due to more sunlight access. 

• How can this information inform natural carbon sequestration efforts? 

• Learn about soil's role in this matter.

Forests store vast quantities of carbon and play a huge role in the world's carbon cycle—as well as in human hopes of mitigating global warming. Tropical rainforests, the revered "lungs of the planet," were once thought to take the cake when it comes to carbon sequestration. But a new study adds to a growing body of evidence that other types of forest may actually be better at sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere. Specifically it finds that young temperate forests may be more effective carbon sinks than are old rainforests.

Researchers at the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) in the United Kingdom modeled carbon storage in old-growth and regrown forests between 1981 and 2010 using recent data on forest ages as well as the latest global land cover change data set produced by the University of Maryland. Their results, published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal that intact, old-growth forests sequestered 950 million to 1.11 billion metric tons of carbon per year while younger forests—those that have been growing less than 140 years—stored between 1.17 and 1.66 billion metric tons per year.

Read the full article about sequestering carbon in new forests by Morgan Erickson-Davis at Pacific Standard.