Historically forests have acted as a large terrestrial carbon (C) sink (Pan et al., 2011;Tagesson et al., 2020), but their future role in the global C budget is uncertain. From 2010 to 2019 the terrestrial land sink was an estimated 12.5 Gt carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) per year (Friedlingstein et al., 2020) with the majority of this stored in forested ecosystems (Tagesson et al., 2020). However, this C sequestration capability is sensitive to a number of natural and anthropogenic influences such as CO 2 enrichment, drought, wildfires, pests, windfall events, land management, and change in land use and land cover (Davidson et al., 2012;Schimel et al., 2015;Yang et al., 2018). Ultimately the future role and efficacy of forests in the C cycle remains uncertain, especially with convergence of rapidly changing climate and disturbance.Disturbances constitute a particularly large uncertainty for forest C dynamics (McKinley et al., 2011). For example, a single storm event in 2005 was responsible for moving 0.09-0.11 Pg C from live to dead biomass pools (Chambers et al., 2007). At the same time, fires within the U.S. release about 0.06 petagrams of C per year (Wiedinmyer & Neff, 2007), and 1.8-3.0 Pg C yr −1 globally (van der Werf et al., 2017). Disturbance events such as storms and fires exhibit high interannual variability and have a broad range of biogeochemical and ecological effects. Many studies have investigated water, nutrients, and C cycling in post-disturbance ecosystems (