Integrated modeling and assessment of North American forest carbon dynamics technical report

The information contained herein is the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the CEC, or the governments of Canada, Mexico or the United States of America. [...] The objective of this project was to improve and harmonize methods for assessing changes in carbon stocks and causes of change, among the three countries of North America, and to develop tools for the estimation, reporting and projection of past and future forest greenhouse gas balances as affected by natural disturbances, forest management, and land-use change. [...] The results of this study describe how different remotely-sensed data and processing algorithms affect the mapping and quantification of areas affected by activities such as natural disturbances and harvesting; how to use spatially referenced and spatially explicit data to drive the CBM-CFS3 model; and the capabilities of different models to assess the impacts of various disturbances on productivi [...] Integrated Modeling and Assessment of North American Forest Carbon Dynamics Analyses of GHG emissions in forest ecosystems require detailed information on the initial conditions of the landscape, including the extent, type and age (or time since the last stand-replacing disturbance) of forest ecosystems. [...] We estimated the contribution of disturbances (fires) and land-use change to the GHG balance of the entire YP and the results showed a small annual carbon sink that diminished over time as the total forest area decreased due to net deforestation, the growth rate of the remaining forests decreased with age, and the emissions per hectare deforested increased with increasing forest age.