NREL Fall Seminar - Carbon Stocks of the Colorado Front Range
Friday, September 1, 2006, 11:00 AM

Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory 2006 Fall Seminar Series

Sept. 1 - NESB Francis Clark Conference Room B215, at 11 a.m.

Jill Baron (NREL), Carbon Stocks of the Colorado Front Range

Abstract (Jill Baron, Rich Conant, Carol Wessman, Nancy Golubiewski, Jeff Hicke, Rick Arnold, Tom Owens, Bill Langer):

We evaluated organic carbon (C) stocks of the forests, grasslands, agricultural lands, urban lands and water resources of the South Platte Basin to evaluate where above-and below-ground organic carbon is on the landscape today, and compare with estimates from pre-European settlement times.

The topic is timely because of the interest in climate change and potential for regional C sequestration, and also because stakeholders in the region are highly interested in objective indicators with which they can evaluate environmental change. Overall, C stocks have declined since pre-European settlement from 407 to 384 Tg, a loss of 5.6%, due to loss of grassland soil organic matter from land use conversion to other uses. Totally new carbon stocks in the Basin occur in urban lawns and forests, and in the 33,000 ha of reservoirs built for water storage. Carbon density is greatest in reservoir sediments, followed by natural and urban forests.

This project is a contribution to the Colorado Front Range Integrated Assessment and the Rocky Mountain Environment and Society Program.

More information about the NREL 2006 Fall Seminar Series can be found at http://www.nrel.colostate.edu/events/seminar.html.

Contact:  Jill Baron at mailto:atjill@nrel.colostate.edu or 491-1968.