Project Funding: 2011 - 2014

NRA: 2010 NASA: Carbon Cycle Science   

Funded by NASA

Abstract:
Forests are the most important terrestrial carbon reservoir and will influence and be influenced by climate change. For this reason, monitoring forest carbon stocks at regional and continental scales will be an important element of a future climate observing system. Such a forest carbon monitoring capability will also be a key input to new generations of coupled Earth system models and will provide a means of validating the large-scale performance of various adaptation and mitigation strategies. The proposed research will build on a methodology that we have developed in previous NASA-funded projects of combining data from the Geosciences Laser Altimetry System (GLAS), which has been flying on the ICESat satellite, with data from airborne lidar, ground plots, land cover classifications, and digital elevation models to predict aboveground forest carbon stocks. Whereas we have previously applied this approach only to northern forests, we adapt our methodology in the current proposal so that we can move our work to the next logical step and apply it to the entire North American continent. The field efforts will be concentrated on forests in the contiguous US and in Mexico. The basic approach makes use of recently measured, geolocated forest inventory plots which are then over flown with a portable airborne lidar. This permits us to relate lidar heights to the aboveground carbon stocks and biomass of the plots. We then fly the airborne lidar over the GLAS ground tracks, allowing us to statistically relate the airborne laser data to the satellite data. The full set of quality-filtered GLAS data can then be extrapolated to larger spatial scales by combining this information with land cover classification and topographic data. Since our previous experience has shown that GLAS does not perform well for estimating biomass of open stands with aboveground biomass <20 Mg ha-1, we will develop an image processing procedure that can integrate the GLAS information with L-band radar data from PALSAR and from the MODIS Vegetation Continuous Fields (VCF) canopy closure product. We will use the VCF optical product to establish a threshold below which PALSAR-based estimates start to replace the GLAS-based estimates. We will also develop a statistical framework for integrating the different satellite information sources into a coherent methodology for estimating the amount and the uncertainty of aboveground forest carbon stocks for all of North America as well as its principal ecoregions. The statistical framework will also allow us to quantify how future changes in land cover and land use in the different regions of North America are likely to impact aboveground carbon stocks. This project will make a significant contribution to the continental-scale components of the North American Carbon Program (NACP) as well as the US-Mexican-Canadian collaboration of the Carbo-NA Program, both high priority elements of NASA's and USDA's carbon cycle science programs.

2015 NASA Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Joint Science Workshop Poster(s)

• Estimating the contribution from tree plantations to the US forest carbon sink   --   (Matthew E Fagan, Douglas Morton, Bruce Cook, Jeffrey Masek, Feng Zhao, Chengquan Huang, Hans Erik Andersen, Ross Nelson)   [abstract]
• G-LiHT: Multi-Sensor Airborne Image Data from Denali to the Yucatan   --   (Bruce Cook, Lawrence A Corp, Douglas Morton, Joel McCorkel)   [abstract]   [poster]
• Estimating Aboveground Biomass of North American Forests Using a Three-Phased Sampling Approach Based on Ground Plots, Airborne Lidar, and the GLAS Satellite Sensor   --   (Hank A. Margolis, Ross Nelson, Paul Montesano, Guoqing Sun, André Beaudoin, Hans Erik Andersen, Michael Wulder, Bruce Cook, Lawrence A Corp, Bernardus de Jong, Fernando Paz)   [abstract]

2013 NASA Terrestrial Ecology Science Team Meeting Poster(s)

• Taking stock of circumboreal forest carbon with spaceborne LiDAR   --   (Christopher Neigh, Ross Nelson, Kenneth Jon Ranson, Hank Margolis, Paul Montesano, Guoqing Sun, Viacheslav Kharuk, Erik Næsset, Michael Wulder, Hans Erik Andersen)   [abstract]

2011 NASA Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Joint Science Workshop Poster(s)

• G-LiHT: Goddard’s LiDAR, Hyperspectral, and Thermal airborne imager   --   (Bruce Cook, Lawrence A Corp, Hank A. Margolis, Jeffrey Masek, Elizabeth M. Middleton, Paul Montesano, Douglas Morton, Ross Nelson, Kenneth Jon Ranson, Jacqueline Rosette, Guoqing Sun, Kurtis John Thome)   [abstract]   [poster]
• Progress in Estimating Boreal Eurasia Biomass Based on ICESat GLAS, ASTER GDEM, and Field Measurements   --   (Christopher Neigh, Ross Nelson, Guoqing Sun, Kenneth Jon Ranson, Paul Montesano, Hank A. Margolis)   [abstract]

More details may be found in the following project profile(s):

• NASA Terrestrial Ecology (TE) Project Profile