Long-term plots
- Site
- Storbäcken commons, Västerbotten
- Years
- 1994 - present
- Funder
- Vinter Foundation · Nordic Research Council
- Role
- Principal investigator since 2016
3 frames on this sheet
Bengt Åkerlund set the first 240 plots out in the autumn of 1994 with a compass, a length of rope and no funding to speak of. The network now runs to 1,240 plots across 4,100 hectares of the Storbäcken commons, covering clear-felled, thinned, burned and untouched ground on the same soil type, and every one of them has been visited in September or early October of every year since.
What we measure has not changed: soil cores to 60 cm at four fixed points, litter mass, standing and fallen deadwood, ground layer cover, and the diameter of every marked stem. What has changed is that the record is now public. Every year from 1994 onward is deposited with the notebook scans beside it, mistakes annotated rather than corrected away.
The headline result, published in 2026, is that soil carbon after clear-felling recovers a good deal more slowly than the models used in national accounting allow - about eighteen years to return to the pre-harvest stock on this soil, against the seven the models assume. That number only exists because somebody kept walking the plots when there was no paper in it.
