Defining a Landscape-Scale Monitoring Tier for the North American Carbon Program

Abstract

Better knowledge of carbon stocks and fluxes is needed to understand the current state of the carbon cycle and how it might evolve with changing land uses and climatic conditions. For Canada, the United States, and Mexico, the North American Carbon Program (NACP) has been devised to measure and understand the sources and sinks of CO 2 , CH 4 , and CO in North America and adjacent ocean regions. At one scale, there are presently several national networks, each containing many thousands of plots, that provide broad characterization of carbon stocks in different land types (especially forest). At a much finer scale and far fewer are intensive sites where detailed and frequent measurements of various carbon cycle stocks and processes are made. There exists a large discontinuity in spatial coverage, frequency of sampling, and scope of research between the intensive sites and the extensive inventory plots. We define here an intermediate (~1 km 2), landscape-scale sampling system to help bridge the gap between these different measurement intensities.