Forest Carbon 101

You know that trees store carbon, but what does that really mean? How much carbon does the tree outside your window store, and how does that compare to the carbon we emit when we travel or power our homes?

Watch this video with a forest ecologist to find out.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• forests
• trees
• carbon
• ecology
• conservancy

[lmarx1]

Yes, when a tree dies and decays it releases much of its C over several years to decades. Although C is cycling from air to tree to soil to air, forests like this one sequester far more C than they release.

There is a lot of research on how to grow trees and use wood if C storage is your main goal. Because forests do so much more than store C providing wildlife habitat, paper and wood, and picnic sites, as well as filtering drinking water  keeping forests as forests is even more important.

[deathByStupid]

Someone was saying to me that when a tree decays it releases the carbon. To what extent is that true?

And if it is, isn't a forest just a temporary carbon storage that gets released later.

Is there any research in what the fastest natural carbon storage would be, as in fastest growing tree or something like that. Potentially it could grown, chopped down, and buried and have a new tree planted in it place?

[lmarx1]

Nothing wrong with metric, Quercus56. The red oak in the video is 45.5 cm in diameter and contains 726 kg of carbon. For this video, we decided to convert to imperial units because we expect most of our viewers to be from the US and wanted to use the units they most likely encounter daily. Thanks for the question! Laura Marx, Forest Ecologist, The Nature Conservancy.

[quercus56]

This is an interesting video, but let down by the use of imperial measurements - what's wrong with metric?

[sg980]

this is awesome nature conservancy!!