PARENT SESSION
Oral Session #69: Elevated CO₂ and Global Change. Presiding: L. Gough.
Thursday, August 9, 2001. 1:00 PM to 4:45 PM. Hall of Ideas H.

Assessing global change impacts on forest carbon sequestration .

Mickler, Robert¹, Earnhardt, Todd², Moore, Jennifer¹, ^{1 2}

ABSTRACT- Forest, agricultural, rangeland, wetland, and urban landscapes have different rates of carbon sequestration and potential sequestration under management options. Changes in the proportion and spatial distribution of land use and land area could enhance or degrade that area's ability to sequester carbon. As the ecosystems within a landscape change due to natural or anthropogenic processes, they may go from being a carbon sink to a carbon source or vice versa. Our ability to monitor changes in ecosystem land use and land cover area must be addressed in order to provide accurate annual inventories of forest carbon. The incorporation of Landsat TM data coupled with forest inventory plot data, a physiologically based forest productivity model (PnET-IV), and historic and projected climatic data provides an opportunity to enhance forest carbon inventory and monitoring processes. We use periodic forest inventory data from the USDA Forest Service's Forest Inventory and Analysis project (FIA) to obtain estimates of forest area and type to generate estimates of live and dead wood storage for conifer, hardwood, and mixed forest classes for use in a accuracy assessment of forest cover at the regional scale. The resulting displays of live and dead wood biomass and net primary productivity generated from forest inventory data and the PnET-IV model show areas of high and low forest carbon storage potential and their spatial relationship to other landscape features for the eastern US.

KEY WORDS: forest , carbon