Regional and Forest-Level Estimates of Carbon Stored in Harvested Wood Products from the United States Forest Service Northern Region, 1906-2010
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Regional and Forest-Level Estimates of Carbon Stored in Harvested Wood Products From the United States Forest Service Northern Region, 1906-2010 Nathaniel Anderson, Jesse Young, Keith Stockmann, Kenneth Skog, Sean Healey, Daniel Loeffler, J. Greg Jones, James Morrison United States Department of Agriculture / Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station General Technical Report RMRS-GTR-311 October 2013 Anderson, N.; Young, J.; Stockmann, K.; Skog, K.; Healey, S.; Loeffler, D.; Jones, J.G.; Morrison, J. 2013. Regional and forest-level estimates of carbon stored in harvested wood products from the United States Forest Service Northern Region, 1906-2010.Gen. Tech. Rep. RMRS-311. Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station. 114 p. Abstract __________________________________________________ Global forests capture and store significant amounts of CO2 through photosynthesis. When car- bon is removed from forests through harvest, a portion of the harvested carbon is stored in wood products, often for many decades. The United States Forest Service (USFS) and other agencies are interested in accurately accounting for carbon flux associated with harvested wood products (HWP) to meet greenhouse gas monitoring commitments and climate change adaptation and mitigation objectives. National-level forest carbon accounting has been in place for over a decade, but there is an increasing need for accounting at the scale of smaller administrative units, including USFS Regions and individual national forests. This paper uses the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) production accounting approach and the California Forest Project Protocol (CFPP) to estimate HWP carbon storage from 1906 to 2010 for the USFS Northern Region and its eleven national forests, which span northern Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, and eastern Washington. For the Northern Region as a whole, carbon stocks in the HWP pool were increasing at one million megagrams of carbon (MgC) per year in the mid-1960s, with peak cumulative storage of 28 million MgC occurring in 1995. Net positive flux into the HWP pool over this period is primarily attributable to high harvest levels in the middle of the twentieth century. Harvest levels declined after 1970, resulting in less carbon entering the HWP pool. Since 1995, emissions from HWP at solid waste disposal sites have exceeded additions from harvesting, resulting in a decline in the total amount of carbon stored in the HWP pool. The Northern Region HWP pool is now in a period of negative net annual stock change because the decay of products harvested between 1906 and 2010 exceeds additions of carbon to the HWP pool through harvest. Though most individual national forests mir- ror Regional-level trends in harvest and carbon flux, the timing and magnitude of change differs among forests with some forests departing notably from Regional trends. Together with estimates of ecosystem carbon, Regional and Forest-level estimates of HWP carbon flux can be used to inform management decisions and guide climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts by the agency. Though our emphasis is on national forests in the Northern Region, we provide a framework by which these accounting methods can be applied more broadly at sub-national scales to other regions, land management units, and firms. Keywords: harvested wood products, carbon accounting, carbon management, greenhouse gas emissions, carbon sequestration Publishing Services Telephone (970) 498-1392 FAX (970) 498-1122 E-mail [email protected] Web site http://www.fs.fed.us/rmrs Mailing Address Publications Distribution Rocky Mountain Research Station 240 West Prospect Road Fort Collins, CO 80526 Authors ________________________________________________ Nathaniel Anderson (corresponding author) is a Research Forester with the U.S. Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Missoula, Montana. Jesse Young is a Forestry Research Technician with the U.S. Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Missoula, Montana. Keith Stockmann is an Economist with the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Region, Missoula, Montana. Kenneth Skog is a Project Leader with the Economics and Statistics Research unit of the U.S. Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, Wisconsin. Sean Healey is a Research Ecologist with the Forest Inventory and Analysis Program, U.S. Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Ogden, Utah. Daniel Loeffler is an Economics Research Associate with the College of Forestry and Conser- vation, University of Montana, Missoula, Montana. J. Greg Jones is a Research Forester (retired), U.S. Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Missoula, Montana. James Morrison is a Regional Climate Change Coordinator (retired), U.S. Forest Service, Northern Region, Missoula, Montana. Acknowledgments _______________________________________ Funding was provided by the USFS, Northern Region Resource Information Management Board, NASA, and the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Forest Inventory and Analysis Timber Product Output officers Todd Morgan, Pat Healey, and Chuck Keegan assisted with estimating the dates when various processing operations commenced in our study area. Critical reviews by Chris Woodall, Cindy Swanson, Larry Scott Baggett, Andrew Pugliese, Greg Kujawa, and Marilyn Buford were all very helpful. We also thank the three anonymous peer reviewers whose comments helped improve this work. Website ________________________________________________ Online tools to help forest managers monitor carbon in HWP and quantify tradeoffs as- sociated with different levels of harvesting have been developed from this work. For tools and resources, please visit: http://maps.gis.usu.edu/HWP/. Contents Background .............................................................................................................. 1 Objectives ..................................................................................................... 3 Methods .................................................................................................................... 3 Accounting Approaches ................................................................................ 3 Data Sources ................................................................................................ 7 Computational Methods ................................................................................ 9 Uncertainty ................................................................................................. 12 A Note about Life Cycle Assessment .......................................................... 14 Results for the Northern Region .......................................................................... 15 Regional-Level Estimates ..................................................................................... 21 National Context ......................................................................................... 21 Applications of These Approaches ............................................................. 22 Harvested Wood Products Carbon by National Forest ............................... 24 Conclusions ................................................................................................ 25 National Forest Reports ........................................................................................ 26 Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest ..................................................... 26 Bitterroot National Forest ............................................................................ 35 Custer National Forest ................................................................................ 43 Flathead National Forest ............................................................................ 51 Gallatin National Forest .............................................................................. 58 Helena National Forest ............................................................................... 66 Idaho Panhandle National Forest ............................................................... 74 Kootenai National Forest ............................................................................ 81 Lewis and Clark National Forest ................................................................. 88 Lolo National Forest ................................................................................... 96 Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest ..................................................... 103 References ............................................................................................................111 Regional and Forest-Level Estimates of Carbon Stored in Harvested Wood Products From the United States Forest Service Northern Region, 1906-2010 Nathaniel Anderson, Jesse Young, Keith Stockmann, Kenneth Skog, Sean Healey, Daniel Loeffler, J. Greg Jones, James Morrison Background _____________________________________ Recent estimates of net annual storage, or flux, indicate that the world’s for- ests are an important carbon sink, removing more carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis than they emit through combustion and decay (Pan and others 2011). The forest sector of the United States (U.S.) currently stores about 48 billion megagrams of carbon (MgC) (USEPA 2010), or the equivalent of about 20 years of U.S. fossil fuel emissions at the 2008 rate. The net additions to ecosystem and harvested wood products (HWP) pools have been estimated at 216 million