Effects of Disturbance on Carbon Sequestration in the New Jersey Pine Barrens

Technical Report · Sun Oct 23 04:00:00 EDT 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1329523· OSTI ID:1329523

Schafer, Karina ^[1]; Bohrer, Gil ^[2]

---

1. Rutgers Univ., Newark, NJ (United States). Biology Dept.; Rutgers University Newark
2. The Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH (United States)

While carbon and water cycling of forests contribute significantly to the Earth's overall biogeochemical cycling, it may be affected by disturbance and climate change. In this research, we contributed to the body of research on leaf-level, ecosystem and regional scale effects of disturbances on forest ecosystems, in an effort to foster more mechanistic understanding, which in turn can improve modeling efforts. Here, we summarize some of the major findings in this research of physical and biogenic disturbances, such as drought, prescribed fire, and insect defoliation, on leaf and ecosystem-scale physiological responses as well as impacts on carbon and water cycling in an Atlantic Coastal Plain upland oak/pine and upland pine forest. Following we have incorporated some of our findings into a new version of the Finite-element Tree-Crown Hydrodynamics (model version 2) model, which improved timing and hysteresis of transpiration modeling for trees. Furthermore, incorporation of hydrodynamics into modeling transpiration improved latent heat flux estimates. In our study on the physiology of the trees, we showed that during drought, stomatal conductance and canopy stomatal conductance were reduced, however, defoliation increased conductance on both leaf-level and canopy scale. Furthermore, after prescribed fire, leaf-level stomatal conductance was unchanged for pines but decreased for oaks, while canopy stomatal conductance decreased temporarily, but then rebounded the following growing season, thus exhibiting transient responses. This study suggests that forest response to disturbance varies from the leaf to ecosystem level as well as species level and thus, these differential responses interplay to determine the fate of forest structure and functioning post disturbance. Incorporating this responses improves model outcome.

• Research Organization: Rutgers Univ., Newark, NJ (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER) (SC-23)
• Contributing Organization: The Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH (United States)
• DOE Contract Number: SC0007041
• OSTI ID: 1329523
• Report Number(s): DE--SC0007041
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
carbon sequestration
forest disturbance
hydrodynamic modeling
sap flux