Suppressing peatland methane production by electron snorkeling through pyrogenic carbon in controlled laboratory incubations

Northern peatlands are experiencing more frequent and severe fire events as a result of changing climate conditions. Recent studies show that such a fire-regime change imposes a direct climate-warming impact by emitting large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. However, the fires also convert parts of the burnt biomass into pyrogenic carbon. Here, we show a potential climate-cooling impact induced by fire-derived pyrogenic carbon in laboratory incubations. We found that the accumulation of pyrogenic carbon reduced post-fire methane production from warm (32 °C) incubated peatland soils by 13–24%. The redox-cycling, capacitive, and conductive electron transfer mechanisms in pyrogenic carbon functioned as an electron snorkel, which facilitated extracellular electron transfer and stimulated soil alternative microbial respiration to suppress methane production. Our results highlight an important, but overlooked, function of pyrogenic carbon in neutralizing forest fire emissions and call for its consideration in the global carbon budget estimation.