A Meta-Regression of 18 Wildfire Chronosequences Reveals Key Environmental Drivers and Knowledge Gaps in the Boreal Nitrogen Balance

Climate change has increased the size and frequency of wildfires across the boreal biome. Severe wildfires in boreal forests have been found to trigger shifts from evergreen to deciduous canopies, which has cascading effects on carbon and nitrogen cycling. Ecosystem productivity and carbon uptake in boreal forests are strongly linked with nitrogen, and Earth system models increasingly depend on our understanding of the nitrogen balance to predict post-fire carbon uptake. To investigate the post-fire boreal nitrogen balance, we combined a mass balance approach and literature synthesis to estimate rates of nitrogen accumulation and nitrogen inputs across a network of 18 boreal wildfire chronosequences that varied in both wildfire regime and post-fire canopy type, comprising 527 forest stands. We found that deciduous- or mixed-dominance boreal forests establishing after severe, stand-replacing fires had the highest nitrogen accumulation rates (15.7 ± 3.8 kg ha⁻¹ year⁻¹), while evergreen-dominated forests establishing after surface- or mixed-severity fires had the lowest nitrogen accumulation rates (1.4 ± 1.1 kg ha⁻¹ year⁻¹). Annual known inputs from nitrogen deposition and biological nitrogen fixation combined, estimated from published data, largely failed to explain the rate of nitrogen accumulation, particularly in deciduous or mixed-dominance forests establishing after stand-replacing fires, suggesting that the origins of most nitrogen in these forest types remain poorly understood. As the frequency of severe wildfires increases across the boreal biome and shifts toward deciduous canopies become more common, our study reveals a large knowledge gap in the resulting nitrogen balance that needs to be resolved in order to improve predictions of forest carbon uptake.