The State of the Northeastern Forest Carbon Cycle: High-Resolution Carbon Accounting for the Regional Forest Sector
Ten Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states have joined in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to develop strategies and policies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating their carbon impacts. These include New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine which have each adopted policies to achieve net or near zero emissions targets in the next 25 to 30 years. NSRC researchers will develop and report a spatially- and temporally-explicit carbon budget for the forest sector of the northeastern states that is comprehensive of the major components.
Researchers will build on current inventory-based carbon estimation methods by integrating state-of-the-art remote sensing data and techniques for wall-to-wall mapping of forest biomass dynamics at high spatial and temporal resolution. This approach improves estimation accuracy and precision for all of the major carbon pools and transfers in the forest-sector carbon budget of the northeastern states, including soil storage, aquatic export, harvest removals, and the fate of wood products.
Finally, they will reconcile and translate the scientific budget with the key policy questions including the current and potential forest-sector carbon offsets to regional- and state-level fossil fuel emissions. The overall result will be a comprehensive estimate of the average annual net forest carbon sink, which will be compared to state-level emissions data to calculate the offset provided by forest carbon uptake.