Where, when, and to what extent will Californian forests remove and store carbon from the atmosphere in the future? How can forests be managed to maximize forest carbon uptake and minimize carbon release? Answers to these questions depend critically on understanding forest resilience to environmental change. In particular, future efforts to ‘firmly establish California’s forest as a more resilient and reliable long-term carbon sink’ (California Forest Carbon Plan 2018) rely on objective, accessible and scientifically defensible quantification of carbon sequestration and storage across the state.

Our proposed CARbon Dynamics Investigator for California (CARDI-C) will achieve this through establishing a collaboration between carbon cycle scientists at UC Davis and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory with forest conservation non-profits (The Conservation Fund), private entities (New Forests) and tribal communities (Yurok tribe) across the state. Specifically, this project will provide estimates of carbon uptake via photosynthesis and carbon storage as aboveground biomass at both a 500m, 8-day and 30m, annual timescale. Further, we will investigate the environmental drivers in carbon uptake using information on weather conditions and use this to predict how the carbon cycle of California’s forest will change going into the future. Ultimately, all of our model projects and forest carbon maps will be made publicly available through an open-source web platform, enabling land managers to understand how forest carbon might change into the future and evaluate current management strategies.

No publications at this time.

For more information on this project please visit:

The Magney Lab website: https://magneylab.ucdavis.edu/
The Conservation Fund website: https://www.conservationfund.org/

Contact Information:

Troy Magney (PI)
tmagney@ucdavis.edu

Lily Klinek
lpklinek@ucdavis.edu

CAL FIRE Forest Health Research Program
FHResearch@fire.ca.gov