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Canadian Forest Service (CFS)
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Special Projects (overview)

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.

Fluxnet Studies

The carbon accounting team is working in collaboration with other forest carbon modeling researchers from across Canada to analyze, in great detail, the forest carbon dynamics of two Fluxnet Canada Research Network (Canadian Carbon Program) sites: (1) Oyster River (coastal British Columbia), and (2) Chibougamau (boreal Quebec). 
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Adding Spatially Explicit Modeling Capability to the CBM-CFS3: Prince George Pilot Project

The carbon accounting team, in collaboration with the EOSD forest cover and change-detection projects, is currently working on a project to develop a prototype spatially explicit framework for the accounting of forest carbon stocks. The site for the pilot project is the area around the northern British Columbia city of Prince George. 
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Dead Organic Matter Calibration

The CBM-CFS3 provides an explicit connection between the dynamics of biomass and dead organic matter (DOM) including soil pools. Biomass components, including foliage, branches, stemwood, coarse and fine roots, are transferred to DOM pools in different proportions that reflect the course of natural stand development. These proportions change dramatically in response to different types of disturbances (such as harvesting or stand-replacing fire) and the timing of the disturbances.  DOM dynamics are modeled using several pools including snag stemwood and branches, coarse woody debris, dead coarse and fine roots, and pools for the organic and mineral soil horizons.  Current research goals of the carbon accounting team directed towards improving the representation of DOM in the CBM-CFS3 include:

  1. Improving the representation of snag dynamics that may differ depending on disturbance type, species and region;
  2. Refining decay parameters for DOM pools and their response to climatic variables;
  3. Stratifying soils into groups based on criteria relevant to carbon stocks and dynamics, and calibrating and validating parameters for each soil group.

For more information, contact: Cindy Shaw or Carolyn Smyth

Uncertainty and Sensitivity Analysis

Increasingly, stakeholders in carbon cycle analyses – model developers, policy-makers and buyers of carbon credits – are recognizing the importance of including estimates of uncertainty in their analyses. Quantifying the uncertainty of model output and indicating how the uncertainty can be apportioned to different sources (sensitivity analysis) is necessary for model validation, and uncertainty analysis is required under various reporting and trading schemes (such as the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories and California’s Climate Registry Forest Project Protocol). In addition, effective applications of the model can be enhanced if the user is made aware of inputs to which the model is particularly sensitive, and thus where future efforts in reducing uncertainty should be concentrated.  
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