EcoSphere

Ground under old trees

Hoh Rainforest

Olympic Peninsula, Washington, United States

Temperate rainforest with three to four metres of rain a year, where dead trees are the seedbed for the next ones.

The ground under

Hoh Rainforest, Olympic Peninsula

47.8606, -123.9351 · keep going ↓

5 cmTopsoil

115.7g/kg

grams of organic carbon per kilogram of soil

The living layer: dead leaves, roots, bacteria, and the fungal threads that bind them into crumbs. Almost everything that happens to soil carbon happens here first.

30 cmThe stock

92t/haHigh

tonnes of organic carbon per hectare, top 30 cm

Approaching what settled grassland and mature woodland hold, where roots and fungal networks have been left undisturbed for decades.

ISRIC — World Soil Information

Modelled at 250-metre resolution from global soil surveys, and read from SoilGrids on 2026-09-01. SoilGrids publishes in versioned releases rather than continuously, so this figure is the current one until they publish again.

deeperThe network

1,760 fungal records near here

Each one is a specimen somebody found and wrote down. The species below are only the ones that fruit visibly; the threads that do the work almost never appear above ground at all.

GBIF — Global Biodiversity Information Facility

Each name links to the original record, with its collector, date and dataset.

Why this ground

Ground under old trees

In an undisturbed forest most of the carbon is not in the trees. It is underneath them, in fungal networks and in the litter they never finish breaking down.

The Hoh receives several metres of precipitation annually, and the combination of constant moisture and cool temperatures means organic matter accumulates faster than it breaks down. The forest floor is deep, soft, and almost entirely made of things that used to be alive.

Fallen trunks here are called nurse logs: seedlings root in the decaying wood, and rows of mature trees still stand in the line of a log that rotted away underneath them a century ago. The nutrient cycle is visible in the shape of the forest itself.

Temperate rainforest holds more carbon per hectare than tropical rainforest, most of it in soil and deadwood rather than canopy — which is the opposite of what most people assume.

Read this against

Or measure somewhere else