Pacific Northwest Forests and Carbon | ScienceDaily
Two recent Oregon State University studies explore the role of West Coast forests in carbon sequestration.
From "Pacific Northwest Forests Could Store More Carbon, Help Address Greenhouse Issues":
> About 65 percent of the live and dead biomass in this region is on public lands, while private lands often have younger age classes of vegetation and less total biomass;
> Contrary to accepted views on biomass stabilization and decline, biomass is still increasing in stands more than 300 years old in the Coast Range, Sierra Nevada and the West Cascade Range, and in stands more than 600 years old in the Klamath Mountains;
> The entire study region of Oregon and Northern California, as far south as San Francisco, holds a total live biomass of about two billion tons of carbon – about 14 percent of the biomass in the whole nation;
> If forests in this region were managed over hundreds of years to maximize carbon sequestration, the carbon in live and dead biomass could theoretically double in the Coast Range, west and east Cascade Range and Sierra Nevada; and triple in the Klamath Mountains.
From "Forest Fire Prevention Efforts Could Lessen Carbon Sequestration, Add To Greenhouse Warming":
> Fuel reduction treatments that have been proposed to reduce wildfire severity also reduce the carbon stored in forests;
> On west side Cascade Range and Coast Range forests, which are wetter, the catastrophic fire return interval is already very long, and the additional levels of fuel accumulation have not been that unusual;
> A wide range of fire reduction approaches, such as salvage logging, understory removal, prescribed fire and other techniques, can effectively reduce fire severity if used properly;
> Such fuel removal almost always reduces carbon storage more than the additional carbon the stand is able to store when made more resistant to wildfire, in part because most of the carbon stored in forest biomass remains unconsumed even by high-severity wildfires.
