%0 Journal Article
%T Estimates of carbon stored in harvested wood products from the United States forest service northern region, 1906-2010
%A Keith D Stockmann
%A Nathaniel M Anderson
%A Kenneth E Skog
%A Sean P Healey
%A Dan R Loeffler
%A Greg Jones
%A James F Morrison
%J Carbon Balance and Management
%D 2012
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1750-0680-7-1
%X Based on the IPCC approach, carbon stocks in the HWP pool were increasing at one million megagrams of carbon (MgC) per year in the mid 1960s, with peak cumulative storage of 28 million MgC occurring in 1995. Net positive flux into the HWP pool over this period is primarily attributable to high harvest levels in the mid twentieth century. Harvest levels declined after 1970, resulting in less carbon entering the HWP pool. Since 1995, emissions from HWP at solid waste disposal sites have exceeded additions from harvesting, resulting in a decline in the total amount of carbon stored in the HWP pool. The CFPP approach shows a similar trend, with 100-year average carbon storage for each annual Northern Region harvest peaking in 1969 at 937,900 MgC, and fluctuating between 84,000 and 150,000 MgC over the last decade.The Northern Region HWP pool is now in a period of negative net annual stock change because the decay of products harvested between 1906 and 2010 exceeds additions of carbon to the HWP pool through harvest. However, total forest carbon includes both HWP and ecosystem carbon, which may have increased over the study period. Though our emphasis is on the Northern Region, we provide a framework by which the IPCC and CFPP methods can be applied broadly at sub-national scales to other regions, land management units, or firms.Recent estimates of net annual storage, or flux, indicate that the world's forests are an important carbon sink, removing more carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis than they emit through combustion and decay [1]. The forest sector of the United States (US) stored about 48,437 teragrams of carbon (TgC) in 2010 [2], or the equivalent of about 30 years of US fossil fuel emissions at the 2008 rate. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that in 2010 net additions to ecosystem and harvested wood products (HWP) pools were 235 TgC yr-1 [2]. Thus, US forests function as a carbon sink, annually offsetting about 15 percent of t
%U http://www.cbmjournal.com/content/7/1/1