2019 Carbon dynamics workshop for land and watershed managers

Address:  
World Trade Center
121 SE Salmon Street, Mezzanine rooms 2-5
Portland OR, 97204

This workshop is a first step in bringing together scientists, land stewards, and policymakers for collaborative and productive discussions on improving the relevance of our carbon science. By involving potential users of research early on and throughout the process, the Pacific Northwest Research Station will develop a coproduction research process that targets shared priorities and leads to high-relevance outcomes. Workshop participants include scientists from the USDA Forest Service and universities; representatives from state forestry departments in California, Oregon, and Washington; non-profit organizations; national forests; and State and Private Forestry.

Forest and grassland ecosystems play a critical role in the global carbon cycle. 

The forests of the Pacific Northwest (PNW), renowned for their productivity, hold globally significant carbon stores. Land managers have identified carbon dynamics in land and watershed management as one of the PNW region’s top priority science needs; and interest is ramping up among legislators, conservation organizations, and the timber industry to better understand the significance of forest carbon and how it interacts with other forest management objectives and practices.

Carbon dynamics research initiative. 

The USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station is a leader in carbon research and accounting, with unique expertise and years of ongoing work in this field. The station is launching a research initiative to enhance policy-relevant understanding of carbon flux and carbon accounting, and fill knowledge gaps about forest carbon dynamics.

Goals of the initiative: 

Forest carbon accounting is notoriously complicated, and uncertainty over the state-of-science only encourages debate over forest management approaches. One of our goals is to address the unresolved questions of policymakers and other partners. We aim to model a coproduction approach to research that showcases the Forest Service Research and Development mission of serving the needs of land managers and other partners.

What is coproduction? 

Coproduction means working hand in hand with partners through all phases of research, from defining problem statements, to outlining study plans, to delivering and integrating research findings and tools. Only by bringing researchers and land managers together across geographic and institutional boundaries can we fully understand the decisionmaking context of our partners and grasp their most critical information needs.

Workshop Agenda

Summary of carbon dynamics workshop by Jane Terzibashian (PDF 14 MB)

Workshop presentations

• British Columbia's forest carbon initiative by Thomas White (PDF 2 MB) 
• Carbon in western US forests: FIA reports by Glenn Christensen (PDF 1.05 MB) 
• Comparing U.S. and Canada carbon management by Rich Birdsey et al. (PDF 1 MB) 
• Forest carbon estimation and projections for British Columbia by Werner Kurz (PDF 2 MB) 
• Forest monitoring and climate policy by Chris Keithley (PDF 485 KB) 
• Harvested wood products -- Carbon in the Pacific West States by Todd Morgan (PDF 976 KB) 
• Oregon forest carbon policy by Andrew Yost (PDF 180 KB) 
• Wood products monitoring: timber flow in the Pacific states by Todd Morgan (PDF 1 MB)