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Taiga-Tundra Ecotone Structure Studies

Kenneth Jon Ranson, NASA GSFC, kenneth.j.ranson@nasa.gov (Presenter)
Guoqing Sun, NASA GSFC/UMD, guoqing.sun@nasa.gov
Paul Montesano, NASA/SSAI, paul.m.montesano@nasa.gov
Christopher Neigh, NASA GSFC, christopher.s.neigh@nasa.gov
Vyacheslav Kharuk, Sukachev Institute of Forests, kharuk@krasn.kras.ru

The Arctic–Boreal zone is known be warming at an accelerated rate relative to other biomes. The taiga (i.e. boreal forest)-tundra ecotone (TTE) is the Earth's longest vegetation transition zone and stretches for more than 13,400 km around Arctic North America, Scandinavia, and Eurasia. Persistent warming has already affected the high northern latitudes, altering vegetation productivity, carbon sequestration, and many other ecosystem processes and services including plant, animal and human habitats. Our nearly 3 decades of work on northern -boreal forests in GSFC's Biospheric Sciences Laboratory has considered forest structure in Maine, Minnesota, portions of Canada, and north-central Siberia using field, aircraft ( where available) and satellite measurements. We have also published results of circumpolar biomass using MODIS and GLAS and high resolution imagery. Our work focusing on the Taiga-Tundra Ecotone (TTE) was initiated as an International Polar Year project to map the circumpolar taiga-tundra ecotone using the MODIS Vegetation Canopy Fraction product and evaluated by higher resolution imagery. MODIS, Landsat, PALSAR and GLAS were the workhorse satellites for our studies. Current efforts include improving resolution of TTE forest cover based on Landsat Vegetation Canopy Fraction products. We are also refining methods for fusing optical SAR measurements for biomass mapping and developing high resolution techniques for directly estimating forest structure parameters. This poster will discuss the our recent work in the context of our circumpolar mapping results. We will summarize our field and remote sensing results and make suggestions for future work in this dynamic and vulnerable ecosystem. The poster is relevant to the JWG questions of 'Can we develop more effective and integrated global products to capture habitat change and relate it to changes in biodiversity, carbon, land cover, water, and other ecosystem services?' and 'Which sensor platforms, citizen science activities, and integrative modeling efforts offer the strongest and scientifically most rigorous additional contributions to quantifying habitat change?'

Presentation Type:  Poster

Session:  Theme 1: Tracking habitat change through new integrative approaches and products   (Mon 1:30 PM)

Associated Project(s): 

  • Ranson, Jon: A High-Resolution Circumpolar Delineation of the Forest-Tundra Ecotone With Implications for Carbon Balance ...details
  • Ranson, Jon: Amount, Spatial Distribution, and Statistical Uncertainty of Aboveground Carbon Stocks in the Circumpolar Boreal Forest ...details
  • Ranson, Jon: MULTISENSOR AIRBORNE AND GROUND STUDIES OF SIBERIAN ARCTIC FORESTS ...details

Poster Location ID: 47

 


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