The USGS LandCarbon project conducted a systematic assessment of carbon stocks and fluxes in ecosystems of the United States and current conditions and future scenarios. As part of the effort, the authors released a series of reports documenting their findings. The reports are organized by region and can be found here.
The suite of data products and visualization tools presented here are developed as part of a national ecosystem assessment conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas (GHG) flux assessment was mandated by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA), which directed the U.S. Department of the Interior to conduct a national assessment to quantify:
- The amount of carbon stored in ecosystems
- The capacity of ecosystems to sequester carbon
- The rate of GHG fluxes in and out of the ecosystems
The assessment focused on changes in carbon stocks and fluxes in all the major ecosystems, and on the major natural and anthropogenic processes that control carbon cycling (such as climate change, land use, and wildland fires). The GHGs considered in this assessment were carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO, from wildland fires only), dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O).
The assessment was conducted using a methodology framework that
- links land use, land management, fire disturbance, and climate data with statistical methods and process-based biogeochemical models to generate spatially and temporally explicit carbon storage and GHG flux estimates
- uses remote sensing input data, existing resource and soil inventories, climate histories, and measurements made by a national network of streamgages
- applies a set of future land- and climate-change scenarios to the assessment to estimate a range of carbon stocks and sequestration rates in ecosystems