Land use and land cover change is a principal global environmental change driver and plays a significant role in determining the future carbon storage and sequestration of the landscape. In New England, temperate broad-leaf forests are the dominant land cover type and are an important sink for atmospheric carbon. A continuation of recent trends in land cover change and forest management is projected to decrease forest carbon storage potential. However, recent trends are often a poor predictor of the future. Here we evaluate five alternative scenarios of future land use, starting with the projection of recent trends in land use and land cover change, along with four alternative scenarios developed through a structured elicitation processes that included hundreds of stakeholders from each of the New England states. The scenario narratives describe widely varying rates, patterns, and intensities of forest land use and management spanning 2010 to 2060. Building on previous work that translated the narratives into quantitative land cover change simulations, we have further translated these narratives into quantitative landscape simulations of land use and forest management change. Using a new release of a landscape forest growth and succession model, we have quantified the effects of the possible future land use and land cover changes on live and harvested biomass carbon.
Results/Conclusions
The scenarios capture significant social variability in how land is used, including choices about transitional biomass energy use, valuing forests for carbon storage, or increasing the local provision of timber for wood products. The simulations produce starkly different landscapes, including scenarios with both marked increases and decreases in carbon storage potential, as compared with recent trends in land use and land cover change. These different estimates of carbon consequences of land use decisions at a landscape scale highlight the importance of adaptive and carbon conscious forest management.