Forests around the world pull carbon out of the atmosphere and are crucial in the global fight to stem climate change. But figuring out how much carbon forests are storing as the planet heats up is tricky. For instance, many countries don’t have a direct, systematic, and timely method for measuring how factors like drought or intense periods of rainfall might influence a forest’s carbon uptake.
The easiest way to collect these data, Evans and DeRose noted in the study, is to include tree ring sampling in existing national forest inventory programs. The inclusion would require minimal additional investment because the cost of revisiting inventory plots is already built into the programs’ budgets. And at least in North America, the foundation for such a network already exists in the form of legacy collections, totaling at least 405,092 cores from across Canada, Mexico, and the United States.
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