Phase II : Collaborations with other NACP scientists
In of the NAFD project, collaborations with other NACP-funded investigators were initiated. These current collaborations will be further enhanced during Phase II. The project has also added new collaborators. These new collaborations will team the NAFD forest disturbance and regrowth products with CO2 flux measurements and models involving the WLEF tall tower in Wisconsin and the ORCA project in Oregon and California. Additional LTSS will be developed for each of these new collaborations. Dense Landsat time series analysis of forest disturbance dynamics may be important in constraining carbon flux models.
Current Collaborators
Jim Collatz leads a project that seeks to integrate NAFD's forest disturbance products with the CASA biogeochemical model to understand the consequences of various types of diturbance and forest management on ecosystem productivity and carbon fluxes. The project will be reconcilling top-down (atmosphere) and bottom-up(biogeochemistry) analayses of net carbon fluxes. The results from Collatz's study will be used by others as boundary conditions for atmospheric transport (forward and inversion) models.
The objective of Richard Houghton's study is to determine the annual net flux of carbon for terrestrial ecosystems of the US. A previous analysis by the principal investigator estimated the annual flux of carbon for the U.S. with census-based data on changes in land use, forestry, and fire management. However, there were a number of processes omitted from the historical analysis. A reanalysis is being undertaken. The new approach will use an improved carbon model with two independent data sets of land-use/cover change: one, historical census data; the second, recent Landsat and disturbance data from the NAFD project. Differences in the estimates of carbon flux (census-based versus Landsat-based) will reveal strengths and weakness of the two approaches and will be used to construct a 'harmonized' estimate of carbon flux more accurate than possible from either approach by itself.