There’s a hell of a lot of carbon out there though. For example, grasslands in spring and summer would typically put out a few hundred pounds of CO2 per acre per day when the grass is respiring in the evening – multiply by a few thousand acres for a relatively small grassland area and you’re looking at many thousands of tons per day (although much of that is soaked up by the very same plants when the sun rises again). For timber plantations growing the Canadian pine, you’re probably looking at a 10-year-old stand holding roughly 800+ tons carbon per acre. For tropical rainforests – well, they can be pretty dense with an awful lot of carbon in the understory, so I’d guess they have quite a bit more carbon per area than a timber plantation.

Cheers!

But there is way more carbon above ground in a rain forest than above ground in a grassland. The amount of carbon below ground in a prairie depends on the prairie.

One thing to consider is the carbon-bearing effluence. The Congo and Amazon rivers, for example, dump an awful lot of stuff into the sea. The sea is a rough analog to the soil storage of a prairie. In counting the carbon-sinking capacities of a rain forest it will be necessary to consider this. Much of the heavier sediment coming form the Congo/Zaire river sinks into the deep ocean where it probably really is as removed from the system as any other carbon. But of course a lot of what goes into the sea would get cycled immediately into whatever system is going on there (plankton, etc.). The Niger and Cross river systems dump huge amounts of carbon into a subducting and forming delta (which in turn produces gas and oil which we are currently removing even at it is forming and burning, but whatever….)

So it’s complicated….