Translating Forest Change to Carbon Emissions/Removals Linking Disturbance Products, Biomass Maps, and Carbon Cycle Modeling in a Comprehensive Carbon Monitoring Framework

Forests are a globally-significant store of carbon, but this store is vulnerable to release from disturbance processes such as harvesting or fires that oxidize forest carbon, releasing it to the atmosphere as CO2 and contributing to global warming. At the same time, intact forests serve as a major offset to rising CO2 concentrations as forest growth becomes stimulated by rising CO2 levels, enabling forests to absorb about one third of annual carbon emissions from fossil fuels and land use change. The balance of these processes is constantly changing and it varies widely from region to region. This project aims to quantify how much carbon is being released and taken up by each process over the entire United States, providing a new method for US reporting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Historical forest clearing is responsible for about one third of all human-caused carbon emissions to date, with the rest coming from the combustion of fossil fuels. Avoiding further losses and protecting carbon uptake are both critical components of mitigating climate change. National and international policies aimed at protecting forest carbon storage rely heavily on high quality, accurate reporting (called “Tier 3”) that earns the greatest financial value of carbon credits and hence incentivizes forest conservation and protection. But methods for Tier 3 Measuring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) are still in development.

This project will offer a new approach to Tier 3 MRV, involving a combination of direct remote sensing, ground based inventorying, and computer modeling methods to track forest carbon emissions and removals at a 1 km scale across the US. Few existing approaches seek to combine all of these sources of information. Another major advantage of our approach is its specificity about the underlying processes driving carbon flows. This enables the framework to be used as a decision support tool to help test the relative benefits of various land management strategies and to examine how today’s carbon sources and sinks will trend over time.