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April 30, 2007 After completing a
two-year pilot
phase, scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center are expanding the
scope of
the "National Biomass and Carbon Dataset" for the year 2000
(NBCD2000), the first ever inventory of its kind, by moving into the
production
phase. Through a combination of NASA satellite datasets, topographic
survey
data, land use/land cover data, and extensive forest inventory data
collected
by the U.S. Forest Service – Forest Inventory and Analysis
Program (FIA),
NBCD2000 will be an invaluable baseline data set for the assessment of
the
carbon stock in U.S. forest vegetation and will improve current methods
of
determining carbon flux between vegetation and the atmosphere. Work on
the
remaining 61 mapping zones will be completed at a rate of roughly one
zone
every seven working days. According to Josef
Kellndorfer,
an associate scientist at the Center who is leading the project,
"Understanding this flux is critical for the quantification and
prediction
of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, a major determinant of the
greenhouse warming
effect in the climate system. Thus, this initiative will directly
support the
North American Carbon Program, which is a major component of the U.S.
Climate
Change Research Program." In the NBCD2000
initiative, begun
in 2005, data is being analyzed in 66 ecologically diverse regions,
termed
"mapping zones", which span the conterminous An initial two-year
pilot phase
(May 2005-2007) served as an iterative period of research devoted to
algorithm
development, testing, and subsequent refinement. Though this work, an
in-depth
understanding of the functional relationships between vegetation canopy
height
and estimates of aboveground biomass and carbon stocks was obtained.
During the
pilot phase, mapping was completed for five of the 66 mapping zones
within the
conterminous Wayne Walker, a
post-doctoral
fellow at the Center who is also working on the project adds, "It has
been
very exciting for us to make use of synergies afforded by the fusion of
optical
and interferometric radar data. To address the considerable demands for
data
throughput, novel software was developed to utilize the newly acquired
Woods
Hole Research Center High Performance Computing Cluster. The new
parallel
computing algorithms have significantly increased our processing speed
such
that we are now able to complete one mapping zone every seven days." May 1 marks the
official
beginning of the two-year (May 2007-2009) production phase and
coincides with
the formal receipt of additional funding from NASA's Terrestrial
Ecology
Program. All NBCD2000 data products will be made available for download
on a
zone-by-zone basis and free of charge from the Seamless Data
Distribution
System operated by the U.S. Geological Survey as well as from an
NBCD2000
project website currently under development (check www.whrc.org
for availability). The entire project is scheduled to finish in early
2009. ##
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