Projection of global forest carbon sequestration potential under changing climate
Lei Ma, University of Maryland, lma6@umd.edu (Presenter)
George Hurtt, University of Maryland, gchurtt@umd.edu
Rachel L Lamb, Maryland Department of Environment (DEP), rachel.lamb@maryland.gov
Hao Tang, National University of Singapore, hao.tang@nus.edu.sg
Quan Shen, University of Maryland, qshen@umd.edu
Limiting global warming below 1.5°C and achieving the net-zero goal requires rapid reduction to fossil emissions and carbon dioxide removal from the forest sector. To provide scientific support to climate mitigation planning, it is required to project future forest carbon sequestration potential (CSP) at global scale, especially with consideration of impacts and associated uncertainties from changes in climate, CO2 concentrations and disturbance. The projection is also required to be resolved at a fine spatial scale to account heterogeneity in contemporary carbon dynamics and to be relevant to local practices. Here, building upon previous regional development, we developed a novel global high resolution forest carbon modeling system which leveraged recent advances in spaceborne lidar remote sensing, climate modeling and ecosystem modeling. In this modeling system, we constrained contemporary carbon stocks and fluxes by incorporating billions of spaceborne lidar observations on forest vertical structure into a recently developed global Ecosystem Demography model (ED v3.0), and ran ED subsequently forward with the latest climate projections from CMIP6. To bound uncertainties associated with climate projection and disturbance, we ran the modeling system under four climate scenarios (i.e., SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5) from several climate models (e.g., GFDL ESM4, MPI ESM1 etc.) and four disturbance scenarios (increase/decrease 50% or 25%). As a result, we produced future annual carbon potential (2021-2100) at 0.01° for each scenario, and splitted CSP into proportion over current forest and potential afforested/reforested areas, respectively. Thes CSP estimate can serve several applications including studying global forest carbon balance under climate change as well carbon impacts from land use planning including forest conservation and afforestation/reforestations.
Associated Project(s):
Poster Location ID: 10
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Poster Session 1
Session Date: Wednesday (9/27) 1:15 PM