Beyond Potential Vegetation: Improving Model Carbon Projections of the Land Surface Using Lidar Remote Sensing

Principal Investigator:

The goal of this proposal is to evaluate the importance of measuring initial forest conditions for accurate land surface carbon projections. Vertical forest canopy measurements are available from airborne lidar observations in a variety of biomes, along with associated ground data. These observations will be used to initialize a height-structured ecosystem model, the Ecosystem Demography model. Model carbon projections will then be evaluated relative to projections made using potential vegetation (derived from conventional remote-sensing classifications) and with projections made from land use history. In so doing, this work will quantify the expected errors in model carbon projections based on each approach. In addition, the research will develop and define how global lidar observations from the Vegetation Canopy Lidar Mission (and potentially from ICESat) are best used for carbon modeling, and the improvement in accuracy that can be expected from approaches that use these data.