Dead trees keep surprisingly large amounts of carbon out of atmosphere

Interesting. I would have guessed that any kind of forests have quite limited cap how much carbon it could retain in dead wood, and that this cap will be pretty much fixed. Unless something will stop natural decay processes releasing the carbon back to the atmosphere I don't see how existing grown forest could increase its capacity, since I suppose it is already at its equilibrium.

(Unlike peatlands, where most of accumulated carbon remains underwater, so it presumably has much larger capacity.)

Simply said, without "burying or sinking wood mass" I see no easy way to prevent carbon from returning into the atmosphere. Basically if we need to take carbon from the atmosphere, we should ideally put it back from where we have been mining it for last couple of centuries.

The article says, "We found that a forest that's developing toward old-growth condition is accruing more wood in the stream than is being lost through decomposition" and "The effect will continue in coming decades, Keeton said, because many mature New England forests are only about halfway through their long recovery from 19th- and 20th-century clearing for timber and agriculture".