Northern forests store a large portion of the earth's carbon in their soils and vegetation. However, increasing wildfire activity due to climate change threatens to release substantial amounts of this carbon as greenhouse gasses which can further drive global warming. Our work in understanding the importance of forest climate conditions and structure has advanced the ability to monitor these emissions, potentially informing more effective climate mitigation strategies. Furthermore, we discovered a set of easy-to-measure forest properties that predict complex interactions between microbes and nutrients in forest soils. These interactions were found to be important for determining the ability of forests to recover and reabsorb carbon from the atmosphere after fire.