Abstract
There is an increasing need to manage forest carbon (Mackey et al. 2013). Forests store much of the globe’s terrestrial carbon (US forest carbon density, plate 1B) and could play a significant role in climate mitigation by decreasing the amount of atmospheric carbon (Smith et al. 2014). However, forests respond to natural disturbances and management, which means that forests could be subject to future carbon losses if climate change increases the occurrence and severity of natural disturbances altering forests (Law & Waring 2015). These possible losses explain why forests are a focus of climate adaptation strategies designed to increase the resilience of forests to natural disturbance, even when such efforts result in lower carbon stocks at present.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Literature Cited
Campbell, J. L., M. E. Harmon, and S. R. Mitchell. 2012. Can fuel reduction treatments really increase forest carbon sequestration by reducing future fire emissions? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 10:83–90.
Harmon, M. E. 2001. Carbon sequestration in forests: Addressing the scale question. Journal of Forestry 99:24–29.
Hudiburg, T. M., B. E. Law, D. P. Turner, J. Campbell, D. Donato, and M. Duane. 2009. Carbon dynamics of Oregon and Northern California forests and potential land-based carbon storage. Ecological Applications 19:163–180.
Krankina, O. N., M. E. Harmon, F. Schnekenburger, and C. A. Sierra. 2012. Carbon balance on federal forest lands of western Oregon and Washington. Forest Ecology and Management 286:171–182.
Law, B. E., and M. E. Harmon. 2011. Forest sector carbon management, measurement and verification, and discussion of policy related to climate change. Carbon Management 2:73–84.
Law, B. E., and R. H. Waring. 2015. Carbon implications of current and future effects of drought, fire and management on Pacific Northwest forests. Forest Ecology and Management 355:4–14.
Mackey, B., I. C. Prentice, W. Steffen, J. I. House, D. Lindenmayer, H. Keith, and S. Berry. 2013. Untangling the confusion around land carbon science and climate change mitigation policy. Nature Climate Change 3:552–557.
Mitchell, S. R., M. E. Harmon, and K. E. B. O’Connell. 2012. Carbon debt and carbon sequestration parity in forest bioenergy production. Global Change Biology, Bioenergy 4:818–827.
Smith, P., M. Bustamante, H. Ahammad, and 46 coauthors. 2014. Agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU). Chap. 11 in Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of climate change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Edited by O. Edenhofer, R. Pichs-Madruga, Y. Sokona, and 13 co-editors. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter11.pdf.
Smithwick, E. A. H., M. E. Harmon, S. M. Remillard, S. A. Acker, and J. F. Franklin. 2002. Potential upper bounds of carbon stores in forests of the Pacific Northwest. Ecological Applications 12:1303–1317.
Stephenson, N. L., A. J. Das, R. Condit, and 34 coauthors. 2014. Rate of tree carbon accumulation increases continuously with tree size. Nature 507:90–93.
TerMikaelian, M. T., S. J. Colombo, and J. Chen. 2015. The burning question: Does forest bioenergy reduce carbon emissions? A review of common misconceptions about forest carbon accounting. Journal of Forestry 113:57–68.
Waring, R. H., and J. F. Franklin. 1979. Evergreen coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest. Science 204:1380–1386.
Zeide, B. 2001. Thinning and growth: A full turnaround. Journal of Forestry 99: 20–25.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Island Press
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Harmon, M.E., Campbell, J.L. (2017). Managing Carbon in the Forest Sector. In: Olson, D.H., Van Horne, B. (eds) People, Forests, and Change. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-768-1_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-768-1_12
Publisher Name: Island Press, Washington, DC
Print ISBN: 978-1-61091-874-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-61091-768-1
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)