Project Funding: 2012 - 2014

NRA: 2011 NASA: Carbon Monitoring System   

Funded by NASA

Abstract:
Forest disturbances are a key process that drives significant variations in the terrestrial carbon budget for North America. While many NASA funded projects for the North American Carbon Program, as well as others funded by U.S. land management agencies, were focused on developing approaches to map forest disturbances, and assess the impacts of these disturbances on carbon cycling. However, efforts have not progressed enough to integrate the results from these efforts in order to provide a forest disturbance product that is useful for assessing the impacts of disturbances. The goal for this proposed Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) pilot project is to (1) develop a new regional carbon monitoring product that utilizes satellite remote sensing data to map forest disturbed area on an annual basis at medium resolution; and (2) to use this product as a basis for assessing the impacts of disturbance on forest carbon stocks for specific ecoregions of the United States. The development of the Forest Disturbance Carbon Tracking System (FDCTS) will provide an approach based on using a number of information products derived from remotely sensed data to address the following objectives: (a) Integrate a number of forest disturbance products in systematic fashion to create a map of the spatial and temporal extent of different forest disturbance events and episodes; and (b) Assess the impacts of these disturbances on key forest characteristics that control changes to carbon cycling (tree mortality, damage to branches and foliage, loss of live biomass, harvest removals, and combustion) for specific forest types in two North American forest ecoregions in order to produce a data product that depicts changes to forest carbon stocks on an annual basis for the ecoregions being studied. This CMS pilot project would focus on forest disturbances in two Level II U.S. ecoregions where disturbances have been dominant drivers of the terrestrial carbon cycle over the past decade: (a) the Western Cordillera ecoregion which has experienced major outbreaks of pine bark beetles as well as wildfire; and (b) the Alaska Boreal Interior ecoregion where burning of deep organic layers during fires represents the major impact on forest carbon cycles. As part of this pilot project, for each ecoregion, we would develop disturbance maps and forest impact products for the 2000s on an annual basis. The outputs from thithis CMS pilot project would be medium resolution (30 m) maps of all forest disturbances in the study ecoregions, which also contains data layers on pre-disturbance forest and carbon pool characteristics, the impacts of forest disturbances on carbon pools, and the amount of carbon remaining after the disturbances for specific pools. Within the climate change area, reliable and up-to-date information is needed on the terrestrial sources and sinks for a number of carbon-based greenhouse gases. The results from this pilot project will demonstrate a new approach for integrating multiple data sources to generate a product that quantifies the impacts of forest disturbance on the primary forest carbon pools. This new data product would not only provide the basis for providing inputs into models that quantify the impacts of disturbances on carbon cycling, but also to validate such models. The pilot project not only represents the first step towards creating national and continental-scale forest disturbance products, but also would provide the foundation for developing a system that would be able to quantify the impacts of forest disturbances on an annual basis going back thirty years to the mid-1980s (based on exploiting the Landsat TM/ETM+ data archive). Such an analysis would not only provide scientists, managers, and policy makers with clearer information on the integrated impacts of past disturbances, but the approach could be used to provide improved information on the impacts of forest disturbance on an annual basis.

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

• NASA Terrestrial Ecology (TE) Project Profile
• North American Carbon Program (NACP) Project Profile
• NASA Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) Project Profile