Research Needs

Research actions to support increased carbon sequestration focus on evaluating the current processes and status of carbon sequestration and the fate of its removals to bio-products, more specifically:

• Synthesizing and analyzing what we know and don't know with respect to net carbon sequestration in forests and wood products.
• Determining the impact of land management activities (e.g., restoration, silviculture) and climate change on global warming potential, which includes carbon, albedo and trace greenhouse gases.
• Improving the understanding of factors controlling land-use change, the ability to quantify past trends and to make projections and estimates of long-term impacts on carbon stocks.
• Quantifying and modeling spatial distribution of the forms of carbon in soil, and the effects of management, climate, and land use change on residence time of those forms.
• Providing estimates of local and national woody biomass supply to meet the increasing interest in fuels from biomass.
• Improving technical, ecological, economic, and carbon performance of forest operations to produce woody biomass for fuels at competitive costs.
• Developing and using life cycle analysis to improve forest management and wood use alternatives for bio-energy and other bio-products.
• Providing integrated strategic evaluation of local, regional and national policies and management actions.
• Developing cost-effective tools for verification of actual carbon sequestration at a local scale, including sequestration in soil, and considering issues such as leakage and baseline setting.
• Quantifying the uncertainty in estimates of future change in ecosystem carbon stocks and wood products in order to conduct risk analysis and build risk estimates into carbon management strategies.
• Identifying market approaches to integrate carbon management, bio-fuels production, and timber management
• Evaluating the social acceptance of alternate carbon management policies and management practices.

Near-Term Research Products

• We will develop a concise, approachable, and authoritative synthesis of the literature regarding what is known, uncertain and unknown regarding carbon sequestration and management.
• We will implement regional case studies on changes in land management that could increase carbon sequestration on land and in products, that will serve as examples for managers.
• We will augment existing decision-support tools to include inventory/life cycle analysis (measurement of carbon and dollar costs and benefits from harvest at the stump to material disposal or use, e.g. in bio-energy).

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