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National Forest Carbon Monitoring, Accounting and Reporting System

Canada’s forest carbon reporting system is called the National Forest Carbon Monitoring, Accounting and Reporting System (NFCMARS). Its purpose is to estimate forest carbon stocks, changes in carbon stocks, and emissions of non-CO2 greenhouse gases in Canada’s managed forests. NFCMARS is designed to estimate past changes in forest carbon stocks—i.e., from 1990 to 2006 (monitoring)—and to predict, based on scenarios of future disturbance rates and management actions, changes in carbon stocks in the next two to three decades (projection).

The system integrates information - such as forest inventories, temporary and permanent sample plots, statistics on fires and insects, and systems quantifying forest growth and yield - into a modeling framework incorporating the best available information and scientific understanding of the ecological processes involved in forest carbon cycling.

figure 1 FCA system
Figure 1. The National Forest Carbon Monitoring, Accounting, and Reporting System.

Key elements of the System include:

The major system outputs include:

Tracking Land-Use Change

The NFCMARS tracks changes in carbon stocks that result from afforestation, reforestation, or deforestation activities in Canada. Under the Kyoto Protocol, Canada is required to monitor changes in carbon stocks that result from afforestation, reforestation, and deforestation activities that have occurred since 1990.   More information…

Forest Management and Disturbance Monitoring

Forest management and natural disturbances, such as forest fires and severe insect outbreaks, influence the carbon stocks in forest ecosystems.  NFCMARS uses the best available statistics on forest management and natural disturbances, obtained from the National Forestry Database program, the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System, and from provinicial and territorial resource management agencies.  More information…

Forest Inventory

Canada’s forests fall under a wide spectrum of different management intensities, ranging from tightly managed forest plantations to remote wilderness forests with little or no human access. Under the UNFCCC, Canada must report annually on greenhouse gas emissions and removals from the “managed forest,” which represents a subset of the total forest area in Canada.  More information…

Spatial Framework

NFCMARS employs a nested ecological framework consisting, at the highest level, of 18 reporting zones based on the Terrestrial Ecozones of Canada. More information…

Special Projects

The carbon accounting team of the Canadian Forest Service is engaged in a wide range of projects designed to make improvements to various components of the NFCMARS and the CBM-CFS3.  More information…

National Inventory Report

To fulfill its reporting obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Canada must prepare an annual National Inventory Report (NIR) detailing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and removals. Overall responsibility for the development and publication of the National Inventory Report resides with Environment Canada (EC). More information…

Policy Development Support

The carbon accounting team of the Canadian Forest Service works in close collaboration with policy makers in both the federal and provincial governments to help ensure that forest policy development is supported by sound science. More information…