Impacts of disturbance history on carbon fluxes from US forests: Application of satellite and inventory data to inform biogeochemical modeling
Christopher
A.
Williams, University of Maryland Baltimore County, caw@umbc.edu
(Presenting)
G.
James
Collatz, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, jim.collatz@nasa.gov
Jeffrey
G.
Masek, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, jeffrey.g.masek@nasa.gov
Forests of North America are believed to be a significant sink for atmospheric carbon in large part caused by regrowth following disturbance. Estimates of this sink’s magnitude and persistence, however, are highly uncertain (see SOCCReport, 2007). For this NACP project we utilize disturbance age and recovery products generated from the Landsat data record (near annual) at fine (<50m) spatial resolution generated by the North American Forest Dynamics Project (SN Goward, PI) together with Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) products to estimate biomass and carbon fluxes at forested sample scenes across the coterminous US. Preliminary results are consistent with previous estimates of the national forest carbon sink but also show that recent (past 25 years) disturbances are contributing a substantial fraction of this sink, especially in South Eastern US.
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