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).
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Project URL(s):
None provided.
Data Products:
Product Title: Forest Carbon Stocks and Fluxes After Disturbance, Southeastern USA, 1990-2010
Start Date: 01/1986End Date: 12/2010 (1990-2010)
Description: This dataset provides estimates of forest carbon stocks and fluxes in the form of aboveground woody biomass (AGB) and net ecosystem productivity (NEP), as a function of the number of years since the most recent disturbance (i.e., stand age) for forests in the southeastern USA at a 30 m resolution for the benchmark years 1990, 2000, and 2010. The study area includes: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Estimates were derived from an inventory-constrained version of the Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach (CASA) carbon cycle process model that accounts for disturbance processes as a function of years since disturbance for each combination of forest type, site productivity, and pre-disturbance biomass. Also provided are the core CASA model data inputs including: the year of the most recent disturbance according to the North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD), the Aerial Detection Survey (ADS), and the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) data products; the type of disturbance; biomass estimates from the year 2000 according to the National Biomass and Carbon Dataset (NBCD); forest type group; a site productivity classification; and the number of years since stand-replacing disturbance, which is akin to forest stand age.
Status: Archived
CMS Science Theme(s): Land Biomass; Land-Atmosphere Flux
Keywords:
Spatial Extent: Southeastern USA
Spatial Resolution: 30 m
Temporal Frequency: annual data for selected years
Archived Data Citation: Gu, H., C.A. Williams, N. Hasler, and Y. Zhou. 2019. Forest Carbon Stocks and Fluxes After Disturbance, Southeastern USA, 1990-2010. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. DOI: 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1728
Bounding Coordinates:
West Longitude:
-89.01000
East Longitude:
-71.28000
North Latitude:
40.89000
South Latitude:
23.23000
Product Title: NAFD-ATT Forest Canopy Cover Loss from Landsat, CONUS, 1986-2010
Start Date: 06/1986End Date: 09/2010 (1986-2010)
Description: Characterizing the cause of forest canopy changes through time is fundamental to understanding current and future forest functions. A better understanding of forest dynamics can help build linkages between patterns and processes. The North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) products provided in this dataset predict characteristics related to the cause of forest canopy cover losses for the conterminous United States (CONUS) derived from Landsat images for the period 1986-2010. The characteristics are summarized in four separate data layers. The first layer labels the type of change event (stable-no change, removals, fire, stress, wind, conversion, other), the second labels the year of the event, the third and fourth layers measure dominance and diversity, measures of qualitative confidence metrics derived from the model predictions. For each pixel the maps depict the greatest magnitude event occurring between 1986-2010.
Status: Archived
CMS Science Theme(s): Land Biomass
Keywords:
Spatial Extent: CONUS
Spatial Resolution: 30 m
Temporal Frequency: A composited single event layer combining all events 1986-2010
Archived Data Citation: Schleeweis, K., G.G. Moisen, C. Toney, T.A. Schroeder, C. Huang, E.A. Freeman, S.N. Goward, and J.L. Dungan. 2020. NAFD-ATT Forest Canopy Cover Loss from Landsat, CONUS, 1986-2010. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. DOI: 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1799
Bounding Coordinates:
West Longitude:
-128.03000
East Longitude:
-65.20000
North Latitude:
51.68000
South Latitude:
22.69000
Product Title: Forest Carbon Stocks and Fluxes from the NFCMS, Conterminous USA, 1990-2010
Start Date: 01/1986End Date: 12/2010 (1986-01-01 to 2010-12-31 (this period covers the input data))
Description: This dataset, derived from the National Forest Carbon Monitoring System (NFCMS), provides estimates of forest carbon stocks and fluxes in the form of aboveground woody biomass (AGB), total live biomass, total ecosystem carbon, aboveground coarse woody debris (CWD), and net ecosystem productivity (NEP) as a function of the number of years since the most recent disturbance (i.e., stand age) for forests of the conterminous U.S. at a 30 m resolution for the benchmark years 1990, 2000, and 2010. The data were derived from an inventory-constrained version of the Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach (CASA) carbon cycle process model that accounts for disturbance processes for each combination of forest type, site productivity, and pre-disturbance biomass. Also provided are the core model data inputs including the year of the most recent disturbance according to the North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) and the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) data products; the type of disturbance; biomass estimates from the year 2000 according to the National Biomass and Carbon Dataset (NBCD); forest-type group; a site productivity classification; and the number of years since stand-replacing disturbance. The data are useful for a wide range of applications including monitoring and reporting recent dynamics of forest carbon across the conterminous U.S., assessment of recent trends with attribution to disturbance and regrowth drivers, conservation planning, and assessment of climate change mitigation opportunities within the forest sector.
Status: Archived
CMS Science Theme(s): Land Biomass; Land-Atmosphere Flux; MRV
Archived Data Citation: Williams, C.A., N. Hasler, H. Gu, and Y. Zhou. 2020. Forest Carbon Stocks and Fluxes from the NFCMS, Conterminous USA, 1990-2010. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. DOI: 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1829
Bounding Coordinates:
West Longitude:
-127.69000
East Longitude:
-65.73000
North Latitude:
50.37000
South Latitude:
23.19000
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
Archived Data Citations:
Williams, C.A., N. Hasler, H. Gu, and Y. Zhou. 2020. Forest Carbon Stocks and Fluxes from the NFCMS, Conterminous USA, 1990-2010. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. DOI: 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1829
Gu, H., C.A. Williams, N. Hasler, and Y. Zhou. 2019. Forest Carbon Stocks and Fluxes After Disturbance, Southeastern USA, 1990-2010. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. DOI: 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1728
Schleeweis, K., G.G. Moisen, C. Toney, T.A. Schroeder, C. Huang, E.A. Freeman, S.N. Goward, and J.L. Dungan. 2020. NAFD-ATT Forest Canopy Cover Loss from Landsat, CONUS, 1986-2010. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. DOI: 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1799
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]