You are here
Harvard Forest REU Symposium Abstract 2022
- Title: Modeling the Disturbance Effects of Major Hurricanes on New England Forest Carbon Under Varying Disturbance Magnitude Scenarios
- Author: Agustin J Leon-Saenz (Harvard University)
- Abstract:
Climate change will likely impact long-term tree mortality patterns through wind disturbance. Thus, using the ten most damaging 20th century New England hurricanes as a baseline, we created models representing plausible hurricane damage scenarios for the 21st century: 1) no change in hurricane intensity; 2) a projected 8% wind speed increase; and 3) a maximum 16% wind speed increase. To model hurricane damage, we used National Hurricane Center data and implemented HurreconR and ExposR to create topographic exposure and hurricane damage maps based on 30-meter resolution digital elevation models. To model the wind susceptibility of trees, we designed a framework based on tree species and height, informed by previous tree mortality observations following major wind disturbances. We employed our tree mortality table to process Forest Service FIA (Forest Inventory Analysis) data and develop an understanding of New England forests based on an imputed FIA map. Finally, we paired the forests data from FIA with the hurricane damage maps to estimate the effect of hurricanes on New England forest carbon. The baseline scenario led to a loss of 1.2 million metric tons of aboveground forest carbon. A projected 16% wind intensity increase led to a roughly 4.8-fold increase in carbon loss compared to the baseline, or the removal of 5.9 million metric tons of carbon throughout the 21st century. Overall, southern New England is the most affected by hurricanes but wind intensity increases led to the heavily forested regions in central New England to have a greater increase in carbon loss.
- Research Category: Regional Studies; Historical and Retrospective Studies; Group Projects; Ecological Informatics and Modelling
