German forest soils soaked up about 3% more methane each year for up to 24 years

Forest soils at 13 sites in southwestern Germany absorbed about 3 percent more methane each year across monitoring records that run for up to 24 years. The finding comes from researchers at the University of Göttingen and the Baden-Württemberg Forest Research Institute, known as FVA, and it cuts against a body of earlier work that expected forest soils to take up less of the gas as the climate changes.

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Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, so any natural process that pulls it out of the air matters to climate budgets.

Thirteen plots and up to 24 years of gas profiles

The study, led by Professor Martin Maier of Göttingen’s Soil Physics Research Group, drew on the long-running soil gas monitoring programme at FVA. As the University of Göttingen press release describes the method, air was sampled roughly every two weeks through thin tubes placed in the ground and then analysed in a laboratory. Verena Lang of FVA is the first author, and the work appeared in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology.

Because soil gas profiles are an indirect measure, the team checked the calculations against an independent method. Airtight chambers placed on the soil surface gave a separate reading of whether the ground was absorbing methane. The two approaches agreed, and the researchers report a significant long-term increase in uptake across the plots, with periods of observation that differ from site to site, ranging up to 24 years.

The paper’s title states its scope plainly: a trend analysis of methane uptake in 13 forest soils based on up to 24 years of field measurements in southwest Germany. Maier, who led the work at Göttingen, previously worked on the FVA monitoring programme that produced the underlying data, which supplied repeated measurements taken at the same places over more than two decades, the kind of record that short field campaigns cannot reproduce.

Drier ground and warmer microbes

The explanation the researchers offer involves two climate effects working together. Lower rainfall leaves forest soils drier, and in dry soil methane diffuses in more easily and reaches deeper layers where microbes consume it. Waterlogged soil does the opposite, because water in the pore spaces blocks gas movement. Rising temperatures add a second push by speeding up the activity of the methane-consuming microbes themselves.

According to the ScienceDaily account of the research, Maier said the long-term data show that climate change “does not necessarily have a negative impact on how much methane forest soils absorb.” He also said the team recorded a significant long-term rise in uptake in the forests it studied, and he argued that multi-year measurement series and monitoring programmes are indispensable for judging the real effects of climate change.

A contrast with the United States and with meta-analyses

Maier set the German result against a larger study in the United States that found methane uptake falling by up to 80 percent as rainfall increased. The comparison shows how much the outcome depends on local water conditions: where rain is increasing and soils are getting wetter, uptake can fall, and where soils are drying, it can rise. Several international meta-analyses had concluded that forest soil methane uptake is declining overall, and the Göttingen team says the picture is more regionally complex than those summaries suggest.

The authors are careful about the limits. A rising methane sink in one part of Germany does not mean that climate change benefits forests as a whole, and the study does not claim that every forest will respond the same way. The researchers stress that the finding says nothing about climate change being good for forests overall; it describes one process, microbial methane consumption in the soil, measured at one set of sites.

Methane in the wider atmosphere

Methane is a greenhouse gas whose atmospheric concentration is set by the balance between what is emitted and what is removed, and forest soils are one of the natural removal routes. A change in how much those soils absorb therefore matters to the global balance, even if one regional study cannot say by how much, and Maier’s team makes no claim about a global total.

Context for the scale comes from the atmosphere itself. NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory reports a global monthly mean methane concentration of 1934.57 parts per billion for June 2026, up from 1929.17 parts per billion in June 2025, and an annual increase of 4.77 parts per billion for 2025, down from 8.04 in 2024. Those figures are preliminary for the most recent year, and they show that sinks such as forest soils operate against a rising total.

The main human sources are laid out in the EPA overview of greenhouse gases: production and transport of coal, natural gas and oil, livestock and other agricultural practices, land use, and decay of organic waste in landfills. Soil uptake is a natural offset to those flows. The German result suggests that in drying temperate forests the offset may be growing, a possibility that only more long-term measurement series in other regions can test.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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