Project Funding: 2014 - 2017

NRA: 2014 NASA: Carbon Monitoring System   

Funded by NASA

Abstract:
Protecting forest carbon storage and uptake is central to national and international polices aimed at mitigating climate change. The success of such policies relies on high quality, accurate reporting (Tier 3) that earns the greatest financial value of carbon credits and hence incentivizes forest conservation and protection. Methods for Tier 3 Measuring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) to assess carbon stocks and fluxes over time and for large areas (national to sub-national) are still in development. They generally involve some combination of direct remote sensing, ground based inventorying, and computer modeling, but have tended to emphasize assessments of live aboveground carbon stocks with a less clear connection to the real target of MRV which is carbon emissions and removals. Most existing methods are also largely ambiguous as to the mechanisms that underlie carbon accumulation, and many have limited capacity for forecasting carbon dynamics over time. This project’s core objective is to build new capacity for a more thorough approach by advancing our existing carbon stock and flux monitoring framework (Williams et al. 2012, 2013) to deliver a new tool for Tier 3 MRV, decision support, and forecasting, all with process-specificity. The proposed methodology begins with extending our existing framework by providing a more detailed family of carbon flux and stock trajectories, and mapping them to a 1x1 km scale for the conterminous US based on new and emerging data products. A number of improvements to the framework are proposed (Tasks 1 to 5), designed to further characterize the attributes of forested pixels beyond the regionally-defined strata used in our prior work (forest type, site productivity, and age) to now also include pre-disturbance biomass, disturbance type, and disturbance severity attributes based on recently developed RS-derived biomass maps (e.g. Kellndorfer et al. 2012, Saatchi et al. 2013), and Landsat-derived disturbance products linked to the NAFD project. Flux and stock trajectories will also be adjusted to account for any growth enhancements we may detect from detailed analysis FIA data (Task 6). Accounting of the fate of harvested wood products will be added (Task 7) to prepare the framework for more complete assessment of the forest sector carbon balance. We will then map carbon fluxes and stocks by assigning values from modeled trajectories to forest attributes defined at a pixel scale (Task 8). The improved framework will be applied for Tier 3 MRV, yielding regional and country-scale annual carbon fluxes and stocks from 1990 to 2011 (Task 9). It will also be applied in a forecasting mode to test carbon implications of likely management and natural disturbance scenarios (Task 10).

Publications:

Fargione, J. E., Bassett, S., Boucher, T., Bridgham, S. D., Conant, R. T., Cook-Patton, S. C., Ellis, P. W., Falcucci, A., Fourqurean, J. W., Gopalakrishna, T., Gu, H., Henderson, B., Hurteau, M. D., Kroeger, K. D., Kroeger, T., Lark, T. J., Leavitt, S. M., Lomax, G., McDonald, R. I., Megonigal, J. P., Miteva, D. A., Richardson, C. J., Sanderman, J., Shoch, D., Spawn, S. A., Veldman, J. W., Williams, C. A., Woodbury, P. B., Zganjar, C., Baranski, M., Elias, P., Houghton, R. A., Landis, E., McGlynn, E., Schlesinger, W. H., Siikamaki, J. V., Sutton-Grier, A. E., Griscom, B. W. 2018. Natural climate solutions for the United States. Science Advances. 4(11). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aat1869

Gu, H., Williams, C. A., Hasler, N., Zhou, Y. 2019. The Carbon Balance of the Southeastern U.S. Forest Sector as Driven by Recent Disturbance Trends. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences. 124(9), 2786-2803. DOI: 10.1029/2018JG004841

Keenan, T. F., Williams, C. A. 2018. The Terrestrial Carbon Sink. Annual Review of Environment and Resources. 43(1), 219-243. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-environ-102017-030204

Schleeweis, K. G., Moisen, G. G., Schroeder, T. A., Toney, C., Freeman, E. A., Goward, S. N., Huang, C., Dungan, J. L. 2020. US National Maps Attributing Forest Change: 1986-2010. Forests. 11(6), 653. DOI: 10.3390/f11060653

Williams, C. A., Gu, H., Jiao, T. 2021. Climate impacts of U.S. forest loss span net warming to net cooling. Science Advances. 7(7). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax8859

Zhou, Y., Williams, C. A., Hasler, N., Gu, H., Kennedy, R. 2021. Beyond biomass to carbon fluxes: application and evaluation of a comprehensive forest carbon monitoring system. Environmental Research Letters. 16(5), 055026. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/abf06d

Gu, H., Williams, C. A., Ghimire, B., Zhao, F., Huang, C. 2016. 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), 6321-6337. DOI: 10.5194/bg-13-6321-2016

Williams, C. A., Gu, H., MacLean, R., Masek, J. G., Collatz, G. J. 2016. Disturbance and the carbon balance of US forests: A quantitative review of impacts from harvests, fires, insects, and droughts. Global and Planetary Change. 143, 66-80. DOI: 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2016.06.002

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

• Continental-Scale Carbon Budget Impacts of Forest Disturbances by Fires, Insects, and Harvests in the US: Mean, Variability, Uncertainty, and Trend   --   (Huan Gu, Christopher A Williams, George James Collatz, Jeffrey Masek, Bardan Ghimire, Gretchen Moisen)   [abstract]

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