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Measures soil organic carbon stocks of grasslands in central Canada using three different approaches. Range of regional estimates of organic carbon from different approaches; Agreement between Canadian Soil Organic Carbon Database and the total soil carbon values of pedon method; Extent of carbon content in the boreal zone.

Discusses the proceedings of an international conference entitled The Role of Boreal Forests and Forestry in the Global Carbon Budget was held in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, from 8 to 12 May, 2000 to examine the present state of understanding of this subject, hosted by the Canadian Forest Service, the conference attracted nearly 300 scientists, forest managers, and policy advisors from around. Themes of the conference, including spectrum of research, broken into four themes, including boreal forest carbon budgets, monitoring and measuring boreal forest carbon fluxes and stocks, forestry practices for carbon management and social and economic issues, including implications of the Kyoto Protocol. Publications which capture the current scientific understanding of the contribution of boreal forests and forestry to the global carbon cycle, as presented at this conference, was captured in a series of publications.

The scientific community, forest managers, environmental organizations, carbon-offset trading systems and policy-makers require tools to account for forest carbon stocks and carbon stock changes. In this paper we describe updates to the Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sector (CBM-CFS3) implemented over the past years. This model of carbon-dynamics implements a Tier 3 approach of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Good Practice Guidance for reporting on carbon stocks and carbon stock changes resulting from Land Use, Land-use Change and Forestry (LULUCF). The CBM-CFS3 is a generic modelling framework that can be applied at the stand, landscape and national levels. The model provides a spatially referenced, hierarchical system for integrating datasets originating from different forest inventory and monitoring programs and includes a structure that allows for tracking of land areas by different land-use and land-use change classes. Ecosystem pools in CBM-CFS3 can be easily mapped to IPCC-defined pools and validated against field measurements. The model uses sophisticated algorithms for converting volume to biomass and explicitly simulates individual annual disturbance events (natural and anthropogenic). Several important scientific updates have been made to improve the representation of ecosystem structure and processes from previous versions of CBM-CFS. These include: (1) an expanded representation of dead organic matter and soil carbon, particularly standing dead trees, and a new algorithm for initializing these pools prior to simulation, (2) a change in the input data requirement for simulating growth from biomass to readily available merchantable volume curves, and new algorithms for converting volume to biomass, (3) improved prediction of belowground biomass, and (4) improved parameters for soil organic matter decay, fire, insect disturbances, and forest management. In addition, an operational-scale version of CBM-CFS3 is freely... [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Examines the behavior of carbon in the ecosystem. Absorption of carbon dioxide by the terrestrial and marine environments; Condition of carbon exchange in the terrestrial biosphere; Factors leading to the evolution of carbon exchange.