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
Repository Citation
Gu, Huan; Williams, Christopher A.; Ghimire, Bardan; Zhao, Feng; and Huang, Chengquan, "High-resolution mapping of time since disturbance and forest carbon flux from remote sensing and inventory data to assess harvest, fire, and beetle disturbance legacies in the Pacific Northwest" (2016). Geography. 882.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_geography/882
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright Conditions
Published source must be acknowledged with citation:
Gu, Huan, et al. "High-resolution mapping of time since disturbance and forest carbon flux from remote sensing and inventory data to assess harvest, fire, and beetle disturbance legacies in the Pacific Northwest." Biogeosciences 13.22 (2016): 6321-6337.
