Wildfire drives persistent and disproportionate losses of particulate relative to mineral-associated soil organic carbon

Wildfire is a major disturbance of terrestrial carbon cycling, yet its effects on functionally distinct soil carbon pools remain poorly resolved at the global scale. Here, we synthesize 210 studies (1,050 observations) to quantify wildfire-induced changes in particulate organic carbon (POC) and mineral-associated organic carbon (MAOC) in surface soil (to 25 cm depth). Wildfire significantly reduced both fractions, with disproportionately larger losses in POC ( − 24.0%) compared to MAOC ( − 9.5%), indicating greater vulnerability of labile carbon pools relative to mineral-stabilized carbon. Temporal analyses reveal that carbon losses do not peak immediately after wildfire but intensify over the first two decades (~20–25 years), followed by gradual recovery, highlighting prolonged post-wildfire ecosystem adjustment. Across sites, the magnitude of carbon loss is primarily controlled by initial soil carbon content, climate, and time since wildfire. Scaling these responses globally, we estimate cumulative wildfire-induced soil organic carbon losses of 885.92 ± 12.75 Tg between 1997 and 2023. Our findings demonstrate that wildfire induces persistent, fraction-specific destabilization of soil carbon, underscoring the critical need for global carbon–climate models to explicitly represent distinct particulate and mineral-associated carbon dynamics to accurately project future land–atmosphere feedbacks under intensifying fire regimes. Labile particulate organic carbon is more vulnerable to wildfire loss than mineral-associated organic carbon, with soil carbon losses intensifying over the first two decades after fire and totalling about 886 Tg globally during 1997–2023, based on a global meta-analysis of 210 studies.