Half empty: The unrealized carbon potential of southwestern riparian corridors
Riparian areas mapped across Arizona and New Mexico could store nearly 400 million metric tons of carbon if fully intact, but existing vegetation covers only a fraction of the potential riparian footprint. On National Forests across the Southwestern Region, the gap between current and potential storage represents roughly 14 million metric tons of carbon - with some forests like the Kaibab and Lincoln storing less than 15 percent of their potential capacity. That deficit is both a measure of degradation and a roadmap for where investments could yield the greatest restoration management returns.
Large woody debris, litter, and above ground biomass--three major carbon pools in riparian ecosystems.
A new synthesis gives spatially explicit estimates of riparian carbon storage and deficit across the American Southwest and its National Forests and Grasslands, providing a decision-relevant framework for prioritizing restoration investments with climate mitigation co-benefits.
This could support the integration of riparian carbon into the Forest Plan revision, watershed condition assessments, and climate adaptation planning. For researchers, it identifies critical data gaps like field-measured carbon stocks, ephemeral/intermittent stream contributions, and climate interaction effects that justify new empirical studies.
Researchers combined spatially explicit national riparian basemaps with hydroclimatic classification and global carbon stock values to produce forest-by-forest carbon storage estimates for riparian ecosystems across the American Southwest and its National Forests & Grasslands. It bridges basic ecological science and applied management by pairing a literature review of carbon dynamics with actionable spatial analysis, and connects restoration practices such as BDAs, and floodplain reconnection to climate mitigation outcomes in an arid-land context that is underrepresented in the global carbon literature.
People
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Person
Katelyn P. Driscoll
Research Ecologisthttps://research.fs.usda.gov/about/people/katelyn.driscoll -
Forest Service Research and Development
Jared Lucian
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University of New Mexico
Laurel Martinez
Publications
- Katelyn P. Driscoll, Laurel F. Martinez, Thomas F. Turner. 2025. Stream restoration effectively alters functional diversity and composition of riparian plant communities in the southern Rocky Mountains, U.S.A.
In memoriam
This work was started by the late Dr. Paulette Ford who was a Research Ecologist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station's Albuquerque Lab. She was editing a book about Southwestern Ecosystems, with a particular focus on fire and carbon. Forest Service research scientist Katelyn Driscoll wrote the chapter on riparian ecosystems, which will be part of two publications covering riparian ecosystems.