New Funding to Study Carbon Sequestered in NJ Coastal Plain

Edwin Green, Rick Lathrop and Joan Ehrenfeld have secured a McIntire-Stennis grant and a Cooperative Agreement with the USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis unit to study and model below-ground organic carbon in the Coastal Plain of New Jersey. Brian Clough, a Ph.D. candidate in Ecology and Evolution will also work on the project.

As a consequence of widespread concern over global climate change, interest has been building in many localities about carbon storage in forests, both above- and below-ground. Above-ground carbon is reasonably well understood, but comparatively little information is available on below-ground carbon. Much of the forest on the Coastal Plain is on former agricultural land that has gone back into succession. In addition, fire is a regular feature of this landscape.

The project will sample soil organic carbon in young and old, burned and unburned forests in the Coastal Plain and investigate the effects of age and fire history on below-ground carbon storage. In addition, field measurements will be combined with remotely sensed data via novel hierarchical Bayesian spatial models to produce statistically reliable maps of below-ground soil organic carbon, complete with valid error bounds.