TCP Final Report: Measuring the Effects of Stand Age and Soil Drainage on Boreal Forest

This was a 6-year research project in the Canadian boreal forest that focused on using field observations to understand how boreal forest carbon balance changes during recovery from catastrophic forest fire. The project began with two overarching goals: (1) to develop techniques that would all the year round operation of 7 eddy covariance sites in a harsh environment at a much lower cost than had previously been possible, and (2) to use these measurements to determine how carbon balance changes during secondary succession. The project ended in 2006, having accomplished its primary objectives. Key contributions to DOE during the study were: (1) Design, test, and demonstrate a lightweight, fully portable eddy flux system that exploits several economies of scale to allow AmeriFlux-quality measurements of CO{sub 2} exchange at many sites for a large reduction in cost (Goulden et al. 2006). (2) Added seven year-round sites to AmeriFlux, at a relatively low per site cost using the Eddy Covariance Mesonet approach (Goulden et al. 2006). These data are freely available on the AmeriFlux web site. (3) Tested and rejected the conventional wisdom that forests lose large amounts of carbon during the first decade after disturbance, then accumulate large amounts of carbon for {approx}several decades, and then return to steady state in old age. Rather, we found that boreal forests recovers quickly from fire and begins to accumulate carbon within {approx}5 years after disturbance. Additionally, we found no evidence that carbon accumulation declines in old stands (Goulden et al. 2006, Goulden et al. in prep). (4) Tested and rejected claims based on remote sensing observations (for example, Myneni et al 1996 using AVHRR) that regions of boreal forest have changed markedly in the last 20 years. Rather, we assembled a much richer data set than had been used in the past (eddy covariance observations, tree rings, biomass, NPP, AVHRR, and LandSat), which we used to establish that the forests in our study region have remained largely constant over the last 20 years after accounting for the effects of stand age and succession (McMillen et al. in review).

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