Past, Present and Future Carbon Accumulation in Arctic and Boreal Peatlands Assessed by Linking Below Ground and Space-Borne Measurements with Peatland Models and GCMs

Dorothy Marie Peteet, NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies, dorothy.m.peteet@nasa.gov (Presenter)
Jonathan Nichols, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, nichols@ldeo.columbia.edu
Chris Small, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, small@ldeo.columbia.edu
Jones Miriam, USGS, miriamjones@usgs.gov

Boreal and Arctic peatlands cover only 3% of Earth’s surface, yet account for 30% of soil carbon—about 550 to 600 Gt. These important carbon-accumulating ecosystems are extremely sensitive to changing climate through climate-forced vegetation change. We propose to develop a suite of widely applicable data products, which will include maps of peatland types (sedge fen, sphagnum bog, shrub bog, and shallow pond), current peatland carbon accumulation rates in various types of peatlands, along with estimates of the stability of those parameters through time, and their sensitivity to future climate change. Our previous work has shown that the rate of carbon accumulation in peatlands on a landscape is strongly controlled by the vegetation type at the peatland surface, which is in turn controlled by climate. We will combine field measurements from over 200 peat cores worldwide with remotely sensed maps of vegetation and phenology to produce a northern hemisphere map of current rates of long-term carbon accumulation. We have recently contributed to multiple syntheses of millennial scale, multi-decadally resolved carbon accumulation rate data from hundreds of sites distributed throughout the Northern Hemisphere in both permafrost and non-permafrost regions. An integral part of the proposed work will be to derive empirical relationships between measured carbon accumulation rates and current vegetation reflectance and phenology data at these sites as measured by MODIS and Landsat. Using these relationships, we will be able to scale up from the existing carbon accumulation rate dataset to a map of carbon accumulation rates for the entire ABoVE doman, and the whole Northern Hemisphere. Our existing data also describe how rates of carbon accumulation have changed over decades to millennia through a variety of peatland environments, allowing us not only to assess the current rate of carbon accumulation, but also the stability of those rates with changing climate.

Presentation Type:  Poster

Session:  Theme 2: Landscapes to coasts: understanding Earth system connections   (Mon 1:30 PM)

Associated Project(s): 

• Related Activity: Related Activity or Previously Funded CC&E Activity not listed ...details

Poster Location ID: 107