Carbon cycling, transport, and fate in Canada’s forests under a rapidly changing climate: Scale matters in systems with short biogeochemical attention spans

In order to better understand the role of Canada’s vast forested area in our country’s carbon budget, further work is needed to monitor ‘hot spots’ of carbon activity – the boundaries between land and lake, and how these landscape positions will react to a changing climate. Further, less is known about the timing around the activation of these hot spots outside of regularly spaced traditional monitoring practices. Working collaboratively with the International Institute for Sustainable Development-Experimental Lakes Area within their long-term mission to conduct watershed research at whole ecosystem level, this study will investigate carbon storage and movement in a representative forested landscape with novel measurements and new scales of space and time. The results of this work will have important implications for forested watersheds to be incorporated into a Canadian landscape-scale model of carbon storage and movement.

Faculty Supervisor:

Nora Casson

Student:

Matthew Morison

Partner:

IISD Experimental Lakes Area Inc

Discipline:

Geography / Geology / Earth science

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Winnipeg