Northeast Forest Carbon and Climate Partnership: Forest Carbon Science

Forest carbon is the carbon that is sequestered, stored, and emitted from forest ecosystems. Carbon is sequestered by taking in carbon dioxide and later stored in living and nonliving plants, soils, and wood products. Carbon is also emitted or shifted outside of the forest back into the atmosphere such as wildfire.  

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Climate Change in the excess of greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is trapped. Excess greenhouses gases produced by people traps radiation that alters global temperatures that impact climate and weather patterns.  

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Carbon dioxide is a gas made of carbon and oxygen. Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air during photosynthesis and store the carbon in wood, leaves, roots, and soil. When this stored carbon is released, it combines with oxygen again and returns to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. 

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Carbon pools are the different places where carbon is stored or moved within a forest. Forest carbon can be stored in living plant tissues above and below ground, dead wood, leaf litter, and soil organic matter. Each of these pools can be further divided and differs in how long it stores carbon and how quickly carbon moves, or “fluxes,” between pools. 

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Carbon can be measured in several ways at the scale of individual trees, forests, or entire landscapes, using a range of tools and methods. These measurements help establish baseline understanding and project future forest carbon estimates allowing comparisons within and among forests over time. 

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Stewardship of forests has the ability to focus to maintain, build resilience, and create new conditions to better improve forest structures to better function in sequestration and storage. In addition, stewardship can support human needs through climate-smart wood products. 

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