North American Carbon Program biometric database: 2nd edition

The database houses North American Carbon Program data from 10 intensively monitored sites at seven stations: Bartlett Experimental Forest (New Hampshire), Fraser Experimental Forest (Colorado), Glacier Lakes Ecosystem Experiments Site (Wyoming), Marcell Experimental Forest (Minnesota), Niwot Ridge Long-term Ecological Research Site (Colorado), Silas Little Experimental Forest (New Jersey), and The Parker Tract (North Carolina). The biometric database contains both measured and estimated data. Measured data include general descriptive information and detailed measurements from 2004-2011. General descriptive information defines the sample area at the station, site, plot, and subplot level. Detailed measurements include tree, shrub, non-woody vegetation, down woody material, stump, litter, forest floor, agricultural crop, leaf area index, fine root, and soils data. Tree data were separated into three size classes: seedling, sapling, and tree. Soil data include chemistry, respiration, and water content.
The two main goals of the North American Carbon Program (NACP) are to (1) develop the scientific basis to support full carbon accounting on regional and continental scales; and (2) support long-term quantitative measurements of fluxes, sources, and sinks of atmospheric CO2 and CH4, and develop forecasts for future trends.

Data reported here were collected at a network of landscape monitoring sites representing forests with different management, disturbance histories, and vegetation to bridge the gap between flux towers and national inventory programs. Key information for each site includes (1) estimates of carbon stocks and quantified impacts of management activity; (2) estimates of net ecosystem production (NEP) and changes in carbon pools; and (3) estimates of forest/atmosphere carbon fluxes. The database was developed to provide detailed, well-documented, and consistent information from a network of long-term observation sites in the United States. The design of the sampling protocol and database provide examples for applications in other regions.
The first edition of these data was published in 2013 (see Cross References). The second edition has three changes relative to the first edition:
1. The database format is now MS Access 2010 (instead of being Access 2007)
2. Soil chemistry data were added for the Cedar Bridge and Silas Little sites (which previously had no soil chemistry data).
3. All seedling and shrub data at the subplot and plot level have been updated to fix an algorithm error in which summed biomass was not divided by the size of the sampled area (over-estimaing biomass). The corrected tables are: Subplot_SeedAG, Subplot_ShrubAG, Plot_SeedAG and Plot_ShrubAG in LCMS_BiometricData_Ver2_Summary_2015-06-15.accdb

Minor metadata updates on 12/12/2016.