Integrated Modeling and Assessment of North American Forest Carbon Dynamics and Climate Change Mitigation Options
Status: Completed
Operational Plan: 2013 - 2014
This project, initiated by the three national forest services of North America, contributed to the development of science-based decision-support models that quantify the impacts of alternative forest and land management options on the carbon balance of North American forests. It also supported the development of land cover and land-cover change products at the continental scale.
Key Accomplishments
- Advancement of methods for monitoring and reporting forest sector greenhouse gas emissions and removal estimates
- Development of a set of continental land-cover change products
- First study to show that increasing the spatial resolution of remote sensing products improves the ability to detect changes in tropical regions where small plots of land undergo change
Products
- Summary report entitled: Integrated Modeling and Assessment of North American Forest Carbon Dynamics: Tools for Monitoring, Reporting and Projecting Forest Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Removals
- Four research projects:
- Estimating North American forest carbon budgets: development and testing of computational tools and modeling approaches
- Estimating carbon dynamics and potential impacts of climate change and disturbances on carbon sequestration in the North American forests using process models: model evaluation and case study
- Remote sensing observations of forest disturbances and their impact on forest carbon dynamics
- Assessment of data sets and change detection approaches for forest carbon mapping in the Yucatán peninsula
- Land cover 2010 and land-cover change 2005–2010 maps and associated data
