General Technical Report

Presents comprehensive procedures for inventorying weight per unit area of living and dead surface vegetation, to facilitate estimation of biomass and appraisal of fuels. Provides instructions for conducting fieldwork and calculating estimates of downed woody material, forest floor litter and duff, herbaceous vegetation, shrubs, and small conifers. Procedures produce the most accurate estimates in the Interior West; however, techniques for herbs, litter, and downed woody material are applicable anywhere. Includes computer program and card punching instructions for processing inventory data.

This study presents techniques for calculating average net annual additions to carbon in forests and in forest products. Forest ecosystem carbon yield tables, representing stand-level merchantable volume and carbon pools as a function of stand age, were developed for 51 forest types within 10 regions of the United States. Separate tables were developed for afforestation and reforestation. Because carbon continues to be sequestered in harvested wood, approaches to calculate carbon sequestered in harvested forest products are included. Although these calculations are simple and inexpensive to use, the uncertainty of results obtained by using representative average values may be high relative to other techniques that use site- or project-specific data. The estimates and methods in this report are consistent with guidelines being updated for the U.S. Voluntary Reporting of Greenhouse Gases Program and with guidelines developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The CD-ROM included with this publication contains a complete set of tables in spreadsheet format.