Maricar Aguilos

The southern US is host to ~130 million hectares of forestland distributed (approximately) as 37 % upland hardwoods, 15 % bottomland hardwoods, 14 % mixed oak-pine, 18 % natural pine and 15 % intensively managed pine. In recent decades, this forest estate has becoming increasingly vulnerable to an array of threats. As the pace of climate change increases and the South becomes increasingly urbanized, the extent to which forest ecosystem services provisioning is compromised remains poorly quantified. Yet through existing networks of forest monitoring programs, process-based ecosystem and landscape models, and remote sensing resources, we have the capacity to develop synthetic understanding of current regional forest conditions across the South. The proposed project will perform a region-wide synthesis of existing data on forest carbon (C) and water cycling using data from the USDA Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program to quantify current forest C storage of the major forest types distributed across the region. We will pair the forest C inventory data with long-term data on forest C and water cycling (GPP, NEP/NEE, NPP, ET, hydrology) from the Ameriflux Program, of which we are long-term members. A subset of research sites that host both inventory plots and eddy-covariance towers will be used to parameterize and validate ecosystem models to faithfully simulate forest C and water cycling of major forest types across the region. Newly developed remote sensing tools, combined with MODIS/Landsat, will then be used to provide detailed distributions of the major forest types across the region, and will be used to directly link RS observations to tower-based fluxes. Finally, we will develop geospatial modeling tools (e.g. GPP = f(forest type, climate, DEM, fire, drought, etc.), tested against tower-model fusion, to scale results and identify the main drivers and threats affecting forest ecosystem services in a spatially-explicit manner across the entire region.