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Harvard Forest REU Symposium Abstract 2023
- Title: Projecting Long-Term Carbon Storage in Forests Across Distinct Modeling Tools: How LANDIS-II Can Assist in Carbon Offset Policy
- Author: Ben J Baraga (Pomona College)
- Abstract:
Forest carbon offset programs, both voluntary and regulatory, are being used as a widely adopted natural climate solution. Regulatory carbon offset programs like the one from the California Air Resource Board (CARB) would benefit from additional tools to vet carbon storage estimates before approving prospective applicants. We compared estimates of forest carbon dynamics from the default tool from the US Forest Service, Forest Vegetation Service (FVS), to those from the LANDIS-II forest landscape model, specifically to find out whether, given a specific cohort of tree stands with various management prescriptions, LANDIS-II and FVS yield similar estimates of long-term standing forest carbon. We ran nine distinct land management prescriptions across forest inventory plots in northern New England using FVS, then converted FVS output into LANDIS-ready inputs. Our findings indicate that FIA data is not inherently translatable between FVS and LANDIS, but our research has opened multiple paths forward. The main reason for the incompatibility was due to the difficulty of replicating FVS initial communities; the complex and often obscure ways FIA data was manipulated “under the hood” of FVS made a full translation impossible in such a short timeframe. This does not take away from our achievements this summer, as we nevertheless made great progress toward our goal by devising a replicable step-by-step translation process, and creating numerous 1:1 comparisons of management prescriptions and carbon storage graphs across the models. Next steps will involve creating simpler tree stands from scratch to calibrate the two models, then slowly ramping up complexity from there. This project has added valuable literature on a novel solution to the well-documented issue that is CARB’s over-crediting of offset projects.
- Research Category: Ecological Informatics and Modelling; Environmental Justice; Forest-Atmosphere Exchange; Regional Studies
