Christine Negra1, Robin O'Malley1, Kent Cavender-Bares1, Caroline Cremer1, and Eric Washburn2. (1) The Heinz Center, 900 Seventeenth Street, NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20006, (2) Windward Consulting, 3200 Tennyson Street, NW, Washington, DC 20015
Carbon storage in forests and farmlands is influenced by land management, disturbance patterns and climate regimes. Major shifts in farming and forestry practices have the potential to enhance carbon sequestration. In the near future, development of a U.S. carbon credit trading regime will likely promote terrestrial offsets of carbon emissions. Encouragement of biofuels production – an alternative to fossil fuels and a strategy for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions – is a prominent issue for the 2007 Farm Bill. To track the direct and indirect effects of carbon trading programs, expanding energy crops, and changing environmental conditions, land managers and policy makers need mechanisms to monitor trends in land use and carbon storage. Objective information systems that establish credible baselines and track changes can provide accountability needed for a trading program to achieve durable carbon sequestration as well as a biofuels initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. New knowledge about the biophysical capacity of farmlands and forests to sequester carbon and supply energy, coupled with evolving environmental measurement techniques, enables translation of plot and county scale information into regional and national frameworks that support policy and management. Connecting local and regional monitoring and management to a system of integrated ecological indicators enables linkages to national scale decision-making and environmental assessments. This presentation will focus on the utility of ecological indicators for tracking the biophysical effects of changing management and environmental conditions on U.S. agricultural and forested ecosystems. Key concepts for indicator design and data systems will be presented. These indicators, which are part of the State of the Nation’s Ecosystems report, are designed to integrate multiple factors so that specific management or environmental issues are not viewed in isolation. Monitoring data must be gathered as part of an ongoing program, using appropriate sampling schemes and methodologies that feature transparent reporting and independent review.