How will climate change affect boreal forest carbon dynamics?
Kurz, Werner1, Stinson, Graham*,1, 1 Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Victoria, BC, Canada ABSTRACT- To understand how boreal forest carbon dynamics might respond to anticipated climatic change, we must consider two important processes. First, projected climatic changes are expected to result in increased frequency of fire and other natural disturbances. Increased rates of stand-replacing disturbances change the forest age class structure and reduce forest carbon stocks at the landscape level. Second, climatic changes may result in increased net ecosystem productivity (NEP). Could higher NEP offset the anticipated carbon losses resulting from increased disturbance frequency? We used the Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sector (CBM-CFS3) to simulate the impacts of changes in disturbance rates, net primary productivity (NPP) and decomposition rates on a hypothetical boreal forest landscape and to explore the impacts of these changes on the landscape-level fore
