Carbon Storage On The Willamette National Forest Brought To

carbon storage on the willamette national forest brought to you by the central cascades adaptive management partnership is the willamet

Carbon Storage on the Willamette National Forest
Brought to you by the
Central Cascades Adaptive Management Partnership
Is the Willamette National Forest involved with research on carbon?
You bet! There is probably more work on carbon dynamics on the
Willamette NF than any other forest in the nation. That work is taking
many different tacks - carbon stores in forests of different types and
age (long-term plots), remote sensing and modeling studies of change
over time, wood decomposition, forest and soil respiration, airshed
work, and more! Scientists like Dr. Mark Harmon and Dr. Warren Cohen
at OSU are working with forest managers on the WNF, putting us in the
position of having more information on our carbon dynamics than any
other forest in the whole National Forest System. Our
Science-Management Partnership with H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest,
Oregon State University, and the USFS PNW Research Lab in Corvallis
provides a direct route for new science to hit our desks. We hope to
start research soon to examine tradeoffs between carbon and other
values of the forest, such as forest products and habitat.
What kind of data is used for carbon analysis? Data is often pulled
from the USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program, which is a
system of plots set up on a 1.7 mile grid on USFS lands across the
country. The FIA plots were started in 2000, on the same plot center
as our former CVS plots (Continuous Vegetation Survey). The FS has
been re-measuring these areas for many decades. The purpose of the FIA
program has been primarily to inventory the forest resource, and the
data is readily available online.
How does tree information get converted into carbon? The first step
includes looking up the best available science on how much carbon our
forests hold. Dr. Mark Harmon at OSU and his colleagues (associated
with our very own H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest) are significantly
adding to the body of research on carbon storage. They published a
paper in 2002 that described how much carbon is stored in Pacific
Northwest forests.
The data on carbon store potential, combined with volumes from FIA
plots, can easily be entered into a Carbon Calculator. One commonly
used is available online (http://ncasi.uml.edu/COLE/). This calculator
was developed by the USFS and the National Council on Air and Stream
Improvement (NCASI, a forest industry research group).
There are many “carbon calculators” floating around out there right
now, and they are all different in how many factors they take into
consideration. Dr. Tom Spies, one of our science partners with the
Corvallis PNW Research Station, is currently working on another
calculator that will help estimate effects of management actions on
carbon. We’ll be working with him to test it out later this year.
So, how much carbon is out there? The Harmon et al. (2002) paper
displays maximum carbon that could be stored - it does not factor
disturbances over time. The paper is clear on this -- they suggest
using it as a bound or difference between actual and maximum
Carbon is usually calculated in megagrams of carbon per hectare, and
shown as Mg C/ha. A megagram is a metric ton, 1000 kg, or 2200 pounds.
The numbers are kind of cool. Over 67% of the carbon is stored in our
forests above ground; an impressive 33% is stored below ground.
According to Dr. Harmon, if anything, the results might underestimate
the amount of carbon stored because the current science is better at
estimating what’s held in live trees, than what’s in a forest’s soils
and dead wood.
Approximately 75% of the WNF is in no-harvest allocations, and as
vegetation continues to grow, if it isn’t altered by disturbances,
carbon is sequestered. Managing forests on longer rotations (>80
years) has been shown to increase carbon stores over time (papers by
Warren Cohen or Mark Harmon). Most of our activities will result in
carbon increases.
For the Cascades:
Total maximum carbon: 829 Mg C/ha (= 326 metric tons carbon /acre)
Above ground - 554 Mg/ha
432 from trees
121 from dead material
1 from understory
Below ground - 275 Mg/ha
122 from soil organic matter
153 from tree roots
How we compare to other forests, using the NCASI/USFS calculator:
Willamette: 164 metric tons carbon/acre
Umpqua: 159 metric tons
Olympic (Washington): 159 metric tons
Siuslaw: 152 metric tons
Gifford Pinchot (Wash.): 152 metric tons
Mount Hood: 150 metric tons
Mount Baker-Snoqualmie (Wash.): 143 metric tons
Siskiyou: 135 metric tons
Rogue River: 127 metric tons
Tongass (Alaska): 127 metric tons
April 2, 2010 Cfriesen and NMichaels
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