Over decades, frequent fires can reduce the amount of stored carbon in nitrogen savanna grassland and broadleaf forest soils, partially because of reduced plant growth, researchers report. These findings are important for worldwide understanding of fire’s impact on the carbon cycle and for modeling the future of global carbon and climate change. The results offer a new perspective on the impact of fire on soil fertility. “Almost all the synthesis studies done to date conclude that fire has relatively little effect on soils, but in large part, researchers focused on a single fire event,” says Adam Pellegrini, a postdoctoral scholar at the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences at Stanford University who is also lead author of a new paper outlining the findings.