There remains great interest in understanding the role of forest management in storing and sequestering carbon. While researchers and land managers have a number of tools available to quantify the impacts of forest management on carbon stocks in growing forests, fewer tools are available that depict the carbon stored “off site” in the form of harvested wood products. These can include short-lived products (i.e., paper or pulp) or long-lived ones (i.e., utility poles). Not incorporating harvested wood product data in simulations of forest carbon can underestimate the total amount of carbon being stored, thus diminishing the benefits of active forest management.

In these podcast, I talk about an example case study using data from the long-term silvicultural experiment at the Penobscot Experimental Forest in central Maine. I share how tools like FVS can be leveraged to better understand the contributions of harvested wood products in understanding forest management impacts and the longevity of forest carbon.