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A model for estimating windbreak carbon within COMET-Farm™

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Abstract

Agroforestry as a land management practice presents a method for partially offsetting greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural land. Of all agroforestry practices in the United States, windbreaks in particular are used throughout the United States providing a useful starting point for deriving a modelling system which could quantify the amount of carbon sequestered on U.S. agricultural land and provide for broad usability. We present our first approximation to this end by presenting a model that estimates current and future stocks within multiple carbon pools of windbreak systems such as live trees, the O horizon, downed woody debris and standing dead trees. In this article, we describe each modelled process driving carbon fluxes within carbon pools including novel windbreak tree growth and mortality models. Our model is generalized by region and species group allowing us to run scenarios for any common tree species in any location within the contiguous United States. Integrated into the agricultural greenhouse gas accounting tool, COMET-Farm™, the windbreak component gives landowners and land managers power to view agroforestry systems in the same context as agricultural operations and provides an alternative to intensive biomass inventories.

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Notes

  1. Supplementing the interactive agroforestry module, estimated carbon stocks for each LRR and species group from establishment through 100 years of growth as well as the selected growth equations are available to view within the Help page on the COMET-Farm™ website, accessible at: http://cometfarm.nrel.colostate.edu.

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Acknowledgments

This work and the COMET-Farm™ system is made possible by financial support from the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) and the USDA Climate Change Program Office. Michelle Schoeneberger contributed invaluable guidance and feedback on ecosystem processes and helped us locate validation datasets. Miles Merwin and Lynn Townsend contributed to early versions of this work. Dean Current, John Kort, Tom Sauer and Xinhua Zhou advised on model development and ecosystem interactions. Kevin Brown, Allison Brown, Adriane Huber, Ben Johnke Ernie Marx, Matt Stermer, Crystal Toureen, Sobha Velayudhan, and Stephen Williams contributed to the research and software development for this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Justin Ziegler, Mark Easter & Amy Swan

  2. School of Natural Resources, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, USA

    James Brandle

  3. Faculty of Crop Sciences, Universidad de Nariño, Pasto, Nariño, Colombia

    William Ballesteros

  4. Northern Research Station, USDA Forest Service, Saint Paul, MN, USA

    Grant Domke

  5. West National Technology Support Center, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, Portland, OR, USA

    Adam Chambers

  6. USDA Agricultural Research Service, Washington, DC, USA

    Marlen Eve

  7. Department of Soil and Crop Sciences & Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Keith Paustian

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  1. Justin Ziegler
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  2. Mark Easter
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  3. Amy Swan
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  4. James Brandle
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  5. William Ballesteros
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  6. Grant Domke
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  7. Adam Chambers
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  8. Marlen Eve
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  9. Keith Paustian
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Correspondence to Justin Ziegler.

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Ziegler, J., Easter, M., Swan, A. et al. A model for estimating windbreak carbon within COMET-Farm™. Agroforest Syst 90, 875–887 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-016-9977-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-016-9977-0

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