Climatic changes are increasingly giving rise to major fires on peatlands in the northern hemisphere, which release massive quantities of carbon dioxide. However, the biomass of the peatland is not entirely consumed by fire, some turns to charcoal in the absence of air. Now, Dr. Tianran Sun and Professor Lars Angenent from Environmental Biotechnology at the University of Tübingen in cooperation with colleagues at Cornell University in the U.S. have discovered that the carbonized biomass reduces production of the methane gases naturally occurring in the peat soil. They estimate that in the long-term after a fire the presence of carbonized biomass causes peatlands to release 13 to 24 percent less methane than before. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas involved in global warming. The scientists suggest that these new findings should be taken into account when calculating the global carbon exchange and modeling the future climate. Their study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.