Forests play a critical role in the fight against climate change by sequestering and storing atmospheric CO2. With British Columbia’s forests covering an area equivalent to the size of France and Germany combined, there is vast potential for sequestering carbon.
To amplify these advantages and boost carbon sequestration, fertilization practices are being widely adopted. This increasing practice necessitates the ability to incrementally measure how forests respond to large-scale fertilization efforts and quantify the change in forest carbon.
While there have been many small-scale trials that measure the predicted impact of fertilization, little has been done following up large-scale programs to determine if the expected benefits were realized. This is largely because collecting growth information at large scales has been cost prohibitive.
Quatern Limited Partnership is measuring forest carbon sequestration using aerial LiDAR-derived individual tree inventories.
LiDAR technology now allows us to cost-effectively collect accurate and detailed tree information across entire landscapes. LiDAR uses laser pulses to generate a 3-dimensional measurement of the ground and vegetation from which attributes of single trees can be derived.
Using technology called Treeid, Quatern Limited Partnership will predict the height, diameter, volume and species of individual trees using LiDAR data collected several years apart. This will be used to quantify the rate at which trees grew in forests that were fertilized compared to those that were not.
This project will be led by Quatern Limited Partnership, a limited partnership between Quatsino First Nations and Western Forest Products, and will demonstrate how this technology can quantify the rate at which trees sequester carbon and the ability of BC’s forests to fight climate change. While this project specifically focuses on fertilization, this is a demonstration of a technology that could be applied to other forest management treatments such as reforestation and thinning.
