Geography

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Accurate assessment of forest carbon storage and uptake is central to policymaking aimed at mitigating climate change and understanding the role forests play in the global carbon cycle. Disturbances have highly diverse impacts on forest carbon dynamics, making them a challenge to quantify and report. Time since disturbance is a key intermediate determinant that AIDS the assessment of disturbancedriven carbon emissions and removals legacies. We propose a new methodology of quantifying time since disturbance and carbon flux across forested landscapes in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) at a fine scale (30 m) by combining remote sensing (RS)-based disturbance year, disturbance type, and above-ground biomass with forest inventory data. When a recent disturbance is detected, time since disturbance can be directly determined by combining three RSderived disturbance products, or time since the last stand clearing can be inferred from a RS-derived 30m biomass map and field inventory-derived species-specific biomass accumulation curves. Net ecosystem productivity (NEP) is further mapped based on carbon stock and flux trajectories derived from the Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach (CASA) model in our prior work that described how NEP changes with time following harvest, fire, or bark beetle disturbances of varying severity. Uncertainties from biomass map and forest inventory data were propagated by probabilistic sampling to provide a statistical distribution of stand age and NEP for each forest pixel. We mapped mean, standard deviation, and statistical distribution of stand age and NEP at 30m in the PNW region. Our map indicated a net ecosystem productivity of 5.9 Tg C yr-1 for forestlands circa 2010 in the study area, with net uptake in relatively mature (> 24 years old) forests (13.6 Tg C yr-1/ overwhelming net negative NEP from tracts that had recent harvests (-6.4 TgC yr-1/, fires (-0.5 TgC yr-1/, and bark beetle outbreaks (-0.8 TgC yr-1/. The approach will be applied to forestlands in other regions of the conterminous US to advance a more comprehensive monitoring, mapping, and reporting of the carbon consequences of forest change across the US.

Publication Title

Biogeosciences

Publication Date

2016

Volume

13

Issue

22

First Page

6321

Last Page

6337

ISSN

1726-4170

DOI

10.5194/bg-13-6321-2016

Keywords

aboveground biomass, beetle, carbon cycle, carbon emission, carbon flux, climate change, emission inventory, forest inventory, monitoring, net ecosystem production, policy making, remote sensing, statistical distribution

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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