Integrating Landscape-scale Forest Measurements with Remote Sensing and Ecosystem Models to Improve Carbon Management Decisions
Richard
Birdsey, U.S. Forest Service, rbirdsey@fs.fed.us
(Presenting)
David
Hollinger, U.S. Forest Service, dhollinger@fs.fed.us
John
Bradford, U.S. Forest Service, jbbradford@fs.fed.us
Michael
Ryan, U.S. Forest Service, mgryan@fs.fed.us
Steven
McNulty, U.S. Forest Service, steve_mcnulty@ncsu.edu
Randall
Kolka, U.S. Forest Service, rkolka@fs.fed.us
Chris
Potter, NASA - Ames, chris.potter@nasa.gov
John
Hom, U.S. Forest Service, jhom@fs.fed.us
Yude
Pan, U.S. Forest Service, yudepan@princeton.edu
Kenneth
Clark, U.S. Forest Service, kennethclark@fs.fed.us
Steven
Klooster, University of California, sklooster@gaia.arc.nasa.gov
Managing forests to increase carbon stocks and reduce emissions requires knowledge of how management practices and natural disturbances affect carbon pools over time, and cost-effective techniques for monitoring and reporting. This study improves upon the methodology to collect and integrate the multi-tier monitoring data from the North American Carbon Program (NACP) with management decisions by systematically scaling up intensive forest carbon measurements to land management areas (or landscapes), and reconciling these estimates with ecosystem models and decision-support systems that are driven by remote sensing and national inventories. We propose to use spatial analysis techniques and an ecosystem process model (PnET-CN) to scale up and map observations from flux towers, landscape biometrics, and inventories to areas of approximately 2500 km2 around flux tower sites. The NASA-CASA model is used to derive estimates for the same areas from remote sensing observations by the MODIS sensor, and biophysical maps. We compare and reconcile the top-down and bottom-up approaches, then use the mapped estimates of productivity and biomass that embed consequences of land disturbances and forest age structure as input to decision-support tools. Key information for the decision-support tools includes (1) estimates of carbon stocks and quantified impacts of management activity; (2) estimates of net ecosystem production (NEP) and changes in carbon pools; and (3) estimates of forest/atmosphere carbon fluxes and relevant effects from various environmental controls. This work is relevant to land managers and climate change policy because it supports a need to estimate and report carbon stocks and changes in carbon stocks to state, regional, national, and private greenhouse gas registries. This work builds upon a foundation of work begun in 2001 by the U.S. Forest Service to implement a forest carbon monitoring and observation system at intermediate or “Tier 3” sites as described in the North American Carbon Program (NACP) science plan.
NASA Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Active Awards Represented by this Poster: