Forest Carbon Tool
Introduction
The planting of new forests is a highly significant land-based measure to help address the effects of climate change.
Forests play an important role in the capture and removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and subsequent storage in forests biomass and soils, a process called sequestration. The long term storage of carbon in harvested wood products (HWPs) and the substitution of selected wood products for fossil fuel energy sources are also important pathways to help meet the climate change challenge.
Teagasc, in conjunction with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) and Forest Environmental Research and Services (FERS) Limited have developed an online Forest Carbon Tool. The tool provides indicative data for potential carbon sequestration associated with new forest enterprises which include current options under the DAFM Forestry Programme. It also provides indicative sequestration data for specific tree species/species groups.
The Forest Carbon Tool
The Forest Carbon Tool takes user-defined descriptive information on the forest and combines it with existing growth models to estimate potential carbon storage over the lifetime of the forest.
This tool provides indicative information only and is not intended to provide definitive estimates on any particular forest. The tool has been developed to contribute to the provision of general information on the capacity of forests to store carbon. It also highlights the complexities and challenges of estimating carbon across different species, soil types and ages.
This is the first version of the Forest Carbon Tool and incorporates a range of assumptions and system boundaries for the data provided. There is an ongoing need to further develop our knowledge on the impact of a range of factors such as forest types, species choices, rotation lengths and management approaches on sequestration potential.
To this end, it is anticipated that updates and enhancements can be incorporated into future versions as new data and research become available.
The Forest Carbon Tool is currently being updated to reflect the latest research and will soon be available again.
