Forest Disturbance and North American Carbon Flux

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Abstract
North America's forests are thought to be a significant sink for atmospheric carbon. Currently, the rate of sequestration by forests on the continent has been estimated at 0.23 petagrams of carbon per year, though the uncertainty about this estimate is nearly 50%. This offsets about 13% of the fossil fuel emissions from the continent [Pacala et al., 2007]. However, the high level of uncertainty in this estimate and the scientific community's limited ability to predict the future direction of the forest carbon flux reflect a lack of detailed knowledge about the effects of forest disturbance and recovery across the continent.The North American Carbon Program (NACP), an interagency initiative to better understand the distribution, origin, and fate of North American sources and sinks of carbon, has highlighted forest disturbance as a critical factor constraining carbon dynamics [Wofsy and Harris, 2002]. National forest inventory programs in Canada, the United States, and Mexico provide important information, but they lack the needed spatial and temporal detail to support annual estimation of carbon fluxes across the continent. To help with this, the NACP recommends that scientists use detailed remote sensing of the land surface to characterize disturbance.