Within the trees. If the trees are preventing each other from capturing carbon efficiently, it wants to burn to reset. Many competing trees will be less effective at storing carbon than a diversity of sizes.
There needs accumulation between each pool. There needs to be decomposing trees to keep the population of decaying fungi active. Like having a strong ferment at home.
Sometimes we need to cut more trees, but the small ones.
Fire is a cleaner - it gives a shock to the carbon factory when it's running slow
Fire is an accelerator - it sends the carbon faster into the soil even if there is some loss