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- B21A-04: Estimating recent trends in forest carbon across the Western US by fusing forest inventory and disturbance data
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NOLA CC
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Claire Zarakas, CarbonPlan (First Author, Presenting Author)
Grayson Badgley, CarbonPlan
Michael Goulden, University of California Irvine
James Randerson, University of California Irvine
We only have a rough idea of how much carbon is stored in US forests, and how that carbon storage is changing over time. It is hard to pin down recent trends in forest carbon because on-the-ground tree measurements are only conducted every five to ten years. To know how much carbon is currently stored in US forests, it is necessary to extrapolate from whenever forests were last measured. Here, we calculate new annual estimates of forest carbon storage in the western US that account for how wildfire disturbance is changing over time. We do this by fusing maps of when forests were disturbed with plot-level statistics on changes in forest carbon from the US forest inventory. We find that in recent years, trends in western US live forest carbon storage differ from official estimates, with our estimates showing less carbon storage. We show that this difference is due to more trees dying due to wildfires. Our results can help to improve state and federal carbon accounting and inform the extent to which climate mitigation strategies rely on forests to achieve net-zero emissions targets.
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