Quantifying greenhouse gas sources and sinks in managed forest systems
| Authors: | Lara T. Murray, Christopher Woodall, Andrew Lister, Keith Stockmann, Hongmei Gu, Shawn Urbanski, Karin Riley, Eric Greenfield, Christopher Farley, Hans-Erik Anderson, Linda S. Heath, Jeff Atkins, Grant Domke, Chris Oishi, James Smith, Richard Birdsey, David Skole, Stephen Prisley, Anthony D’Amato, Ethan Belair, Eric Marland, Prakash Nepal, Poonam Khatri, Indroneil Ganguly, Richard Bergman, Kamalakanta Sahoo, John Shaw, Jens T. Stevens, Thomas Buchholz, John Gunn, Lisa McCauley, Joe Fargione, Alexis Ellis, David Nowak, Mark Majewsky, Christopher M. Mihiar |
| Year: | 2024 |
| Type: | Technical Bulletin |
| Station: | Washington Office |
| Source: | In: Hanson, Wes L.; Itle, Cortney; Edquist, Kara, eds. Quantifying greenhouse gas fluxes in agriculture and forestry: Methods for entity‐scale inventory. Technical Bulletin Number 1939, 2nd edition. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of the Chief Economist. 5-1 – 5-178. Chapter 5. |
Abstract
This chapter provides methodologies and guidance on estimating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or carbon removals (i.e., sequestration) associated with entity-level activities of the forestry sector:
Section 5.1 provides an overview of management practices and resulting GHG emissions or carbon removals, including silviculture practices and treatments, harvested wood products (HWPs), urban forest management, and wildfire and prescribed fire.1 It also discusses system boundaries and temporal scale, the selected methods/models, and sources of data. Section 5.2 provides the methods for estimating carbon stocks and carbon stock change from managed forest systems. Note that—because forest operations are often integrated and planned over more space and time than other operations covered in this guidance— many entity-scale GHG estimations will need to use a number of these methods.
This chapter has three appendixes, as well as an accompanying Excel workbook:
Appendix 5-A provides an overview of silvicultural practices, HWPs, urban forest management, and natural disturbances, including a general background for forestry management activities and details on how to use online tools. Appendix 5-B provides the rationale and technical documentation for the chosen methods.
Appendix 5-C summarizes the known research gaps that inform these chosen methods as well as provides the basis for future development of methods.
The Excel workbook facilitates quantification approaches for silvicultural practices and improved forest management (section 5.2.1), HWPs (section 5.2.2), and wildfire and prescribed fire activities (section 5.2.3). It provides the resulting GHG estimations or carbon removals with user-defined inputs. These results are divided along sector boundaries to better agree with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidance. See table 5-5, in section 5.1, for a brief guide to the Excel workbook’s structure. These files are available from: https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/USDA-Methods-Report-Chapter-5-Files.zip