Forest Aboveground Biomass 2000-2023 for Maryland, USA

This dataset provides 30-m resolution maps of estimated forest aboveground biomass (AGB) in the state of Maryland between 2000-2023. This dataset was produced by a novel forest carbon monitoring system which utilizes high resolution remote sensing of contemporary tree cover and canopy height as powerful constraints within a process-based ecosystem model to reconstruct the spatial and temporal dynamics in AGB while considering impacts of spatially and temporally transient meteorology, elevated CO2 and disturbance. This dataset reports AGB in unit of kg C/m2.

This forest carbon monitoring system was built on a process-based ecosystem model called Ecosystem Demography (ED) (Hurtt et al 1998; Moorcroft et al 2001; Ma et al 2022), which can simulate plant dynamics including growth, mortality, and reproduction; carbon dynamics within the simulated plants; and dynamics of carbon pools in forest ecosystems.

This forest carbon monitoring system ingests transient meteorology from Daymet (Thornton et al 2016) and MERRA2 (Gelaro et al. 2017) and CO2 concentrations from NOAA, remote sensing of forest change from the Global Forest Change (Hansen et al 2013), contemporary tree cover and canopy height from airborne lidar (e.g. Tang et al. 2021) and aerial imagery from National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP). More details about the system development can be found in Hurtt et al. 2022.

This data is currently utilized in the State of Maryland’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory and is scheduled to be updated at least triennially as part of updates to the State’s inventory. This data is also serves as the basis for calculations within the University of Maryland Peer-Reviewed Offset Protocol for Maryland Reforestation/Afforestation Projects.

For questions and support please contact [e-mail], [e-mail] and [e-mail].

This work was supported by contract from the Maryland Department of the Environment. We also gratefully acknowledge the support of NASA Carbon Monitoring System project (80NSSC21K1059).