Left standing, Pacific Northwest forests could cool the climate

Environment News Service: The deep green forests of the Pacific Northwest hold great potential to increase carbon storage and help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, if they are managed primarily for that purpose, new research has found. In the complete absence of fire or timber harvest, the forests of Oregon and Northern California could theoretically almost double their carbon storage, according to scientists in the Oregon State University College of Forestry.

The authors recognized that a complete absence of disturbance is unrealistic, so their estimates were based on average conditions up until now that include variation in forest biomass, age, climate, disturbances and soil fertility. If all forest stands in this region were just allowed to increase in age by 50 years, their potential to store atmospheric carbon would still increase by 15 percent, the study concludes.

That would be a "modest, but not insignificant offset to the nation's carbon budget," scientists say, since the 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 nation.

"We have known that forests in this region have high productivity, and in recent years we have learned they have a high potential to store large amounts of carbon even at very old ages," said Beverly Law, a professor of forest science at Oregon State….

View of the Calapooya Mountains from Fairview Peak Lookout, Umpqua National Forest, Oregon, US Department of Agriculture