Second, we must know how much of the biomass actually burned. Rarely does all of the material burn. Values for fraction of biomass burned range from 0.30 for forests to 1.00 for grasslands. These values will be affected by how quickly the fire burns and the moisture content of the biomass. Third, we need to know how much carbon is in the vegetation.
Trees tend to have more carbon than grasses and shrubs.
This depends on the conditions of the burn. During flaming-hot fires, the dominant gas released is CO 2 . But once the fire begins to smolder, combustion is no longer complete, and CO and other hydrocarbons become a significant fraction of the emissions. After the fire, the remaining material is slowly decomposed by bacteria and fungi, with significant amounts of carbon being released, possibly as CH 4 . In the opening page of this section, we learned that different gases have different global warming potentials.