Description: - Metric Name: Total Aboveground Carbon
- Tier: 1
- Data Vintage: 09/2020
- Unit Of Measure: Grams dry matter/m2
- Metric Definition and Relevance: Identifying ecosystem carbon is essential to land managers and the Total Aboveground Carbon metric provides an estimate of the amount of existing carbon and its location on California’s landscape. The metric also serves to provide context for the other metrics used to quantify carbon sequestration. For example, instability or lack of resilience in forests with low total aboveground carbon would be of less concern than the same degree of instability in a forest that has large total aboveground carbon.
- Creation Method: The Center for Ecosystem Climate Solutions (CECS) DataEngine model tracks monthly carbon in multiple pools from 1986 to 2020. The carbon components are initialized with eMapR (see, a, ) observations for the early Landsat era; the model then runs freely based on Landsat and other observations. Disturbances and disturbance intensity are tracked annually by Landsat (see other metrics developed by CECS) and used to quantitatively transfer or combust pools. The model allocates and turns over material based on allometric scaling theory, as adjusted by observational data sets. Aboveground pools (live tree, live shrubs and dead material) are summed for September of 2020., p