- Benjamin M. Sleeter; Supervisory Research Geographer, Western Geographic Science Center; [email protected]
- Todd J. Hawbaker; Supervisory Research Ecologist, Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Center; [email protected]
- Headquarters
- Zhiliang Zhu, Project Chief Biological Carbon Sequestration Project; [email protected]
- Bradley Reed, Program Coordinator Land Change Science, [email protected]
- Western Geographic Science Center (WGSC)
- Benjamin M. Sleeter, Research Geographer; [email protected]
- Jinxun Liu, Research Physical Scientist; [email protected]
- Jason Kreitler; Research Geographer; [email protected]
- Paul Selmants; Research Physical Scientist; [email protected]
- Jason Sherba; Geographer; [email protected]
- Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Center (GECSC)
- Todd J. Hawbaker
- Paul Henne
- Wetland and Aquatic Research Center (WARC)
- Camille Stagg,
- Brady Coulvillion
- Hydrologic Remote Sensing Branch (HRSB)
- Rachel Sleeter
Public Access to Data: All data, models, and reports will be produced, published, and archived using ScienceBase
- Land Change Science Research and Development Program (PI B.M. Sleeter)
<<<<<<< HEAD # A. Project Overview We propose a 3-year research project aimed at developing a state-of-the-art capability to assess carbon storage and flux in ecosystems of the United States. This project will build on the experience and lesons-learned from the first USGS Biological Carbon Sequestration Assessment and strive to make a number of scientific and methodological improvements. At its core, this new assessment activity will leverge a number of new and innovative research capabilities developed since completion of the first assessment, including integration within the USGS’s Land Use and Carbon Scenario Simulator (LUCAS) modeling framework. The 3-year project will consist of three priamry stages and will begin in earnest in the Winter/Spring of 2019. Culmination of this project will be achieved with publication and the release of an updated assessment in September 2021.
Similar to the original assessment, we will develop and outline a methodological approach aimed at developing a sustained LandCarbon assessment capability. This will be achieved by gathering relative experts in the fields of land change, ecosystem carbon processes, climate change, and natural disturbances for a series of focused workshops aimed at:
- identifying the major controlling processes to be considered,
- prioritizing gaps in current knowledge for inclusion into the assessment,
- defining the boundaries of the assessment,
- laying out a structured approach to produce repeatable and reprodibible results, and
- developing a tiered system for updating future assessments where current knowledge gaps are prioritized for inclusion in subsequent versions.
This phase of the research will begin in ernest in the Summer of 2019 and extend throughout the duration of the project. Given the scale and scope of the proposed project, we propose to minimize new data generation where possible by leverging current publically available resources whenever possible. For example, existing downscaled climate data will be utilized, as opposed to generating new datasets. Similarily, scenario projections will be based on the latest publically available databases consistent with IPCC research activites. Where no current data exists (e.g. climate-driven projections of disturbances) we will leverage approaches described in literature. Data collection activities generally include the following categories:
- Future scenario framework (RCPs, SSP, global mitigation scenarios),
- Historical and future projected changes in weather and climate (PRISM, LOCA),
- Historical and projected rates of land use, land-use change, land management (LC Trends, NLCD, LCMAP),
- Natural disturbance regimes and their projected changes due to climate and land use (MTBS, Landfire, Burn Area ECV),
- Initial conditions, including current land-use/land-cover and vegetation composition (Landfire, NLCD, LCMAP).
Key to success of this project will be the development of a framework for publication of results. Unlike previous efforts, we will develop a standardized reporting system which is integrated within the actual modeling environment. The goal of this activity is two-fold. First, the integration of a standardized set of reports will reduce the “time-to-delivery” once all model runs and analysis has been finished. Second, this effort will provide an open and transparent reporting framework which will facilitate the peer review process. As such, activites related to reporting and publication, including development of online data access will be run in parallel with other scientific activies described in the previous section. To achieve this goal the project team will work with USGS experts in publications and online visualization to ensure assessment products can be provided in a timely manor.
- Purpose, justification, and context for the assessment (Zhu and
Reed)
- Purpose/goals
- Justification
- EISA 2007 requirements/interpretation
- Context – How does the LandCarbon assessment relate to other work?
- IPCC
- EPA GHG inventory
- FS FIA inventory
- State of the Carbon Cycle Report
- National Climate Change Assessment
- LandCarbon v1
Title of Task 1:
Task Leaders:
Phone:
email:
- Partners:
- EPA?
- LANDFIRE fuels team if going the FIA-FVS route
- FIA (Forest Health Assessment and Applied Science Team (FHAAST) for Insect disturbances)
-
Carbon pools and fluxes considered
- Live, DOM, Soil, HWP?
-
Thematic resolution
- Forest classification (Can we link to LANDFIRE EVT or some coarser classification?)
-
Spatial extent – national? CONUS vs including AK and HI.
-
Spatial and temporal resolution
-
Reporting units
-
Integrated modeling approach (Sleeter)
- focus on integration of carbon dynamics with land/water surface dynamics?
- input and output uncertainties
- attribution
-
Ecosystem carbon dynamics
- Terrestrial (Selmants and Liu)
- Can we simulate stock changes using FIA and FVS by EVT for disturbances/harvest/ecoregion? Can we get LANDFIRE to do this for us?
- Wetland (Stagg and R. Sleeter)
- Aquatic
- Agriculture
- Urban/developed (Diffendorfer?)
- Where to address lateral fluxes?
-
Land/water surface dynamics
- Baseline land-use patterns and future land-use scenarios (Sleeter)
- Baseline disturbance and future potential disturbances (Hawbaker and Henne), Wildfire fire, Prescribed fire (with Tall Timbers)
-
Vegetation feedbacks with climate and disturbance (Henne and Vanderhoof)
- Succession
- Type conversion
-
Climate change scenarios and impacts
- Use Abatzglou’s data for CONUS - http://www.climatologylab.org/products.html
- Mitigation actions, impacts, and scenarios
- Case studies vs large scale?
- Fuel treatments (Krietler and Hawbaker)
- Land use?
- Forestry – primarily harvesting patterns and methods
- Rangelands
- Wetlands (R. Sleeter?)
- Agriculture?
- DOI lands
- Economics of mitigation actions (Bagstad and Kreitler and Pindilli)?
-
Planned topics for future assessments
- Disturbances
- Insects v3 (with FS FHAAST)
- Drought v3 or v4 (Henne and Craig Allen’s team)
- MTBS and BAECV?
- Surface water extent ECV?
- LANDFIRE veg, fuels, and disturbances (especially fuel treatments)?
- NLCD/LCMAP?
- Better wetland maps?
- Climate data - baseline and projected
We propose to use the USGS LUCAS modeling framework to conduct the assessment (1). * Modeling Approach + LUCAS model as a modeling framework. + External models either linked or coupled. + Minimize amount of work that can not be connected (in code). + Statistical
- Critical infrastructure:
- Computing power and shared storage?
- Will YETI2 be online at EROS?
- Cloud services?
- Working archive for data, code, and models?
High Performance Computing (Jason Kreitler) We will parallelize the LUCAS modeling framework used in this assessment to efficiently model the computationally intensive collection of model runs, scenarios, timesteps, and spatial scales required to meet the objectives of this study. The LUCAS model will be parallelized for a high performance computing (HPC) environment by spatially stratifying models into smaller regions and distributing these jobs across a large compute cluster like the USGS’s YETI high performance computer. Previous application of the LUCAS model on YETI allowed the simulation of land use change over a CONUS extent with more Monte Carlo replicates and at a finer resolution than previous examples (could cite data release). Using lessons learned from () and (sleeter CA paper) we further develop the ability of the LUCAS model to simulate and model land use change and carbon accounting.
- Input and output data
- Models/source code (if public) or executables
- Visualization tools
1. B. M. Sleeter et al., Effects of contemporary land-use and land-cover change on the carbon balance of terrestrial ecosystems in the united states. Environmental Research Letters. 13, 045006 (2018).