Decreasing landscape carbon storage in western US forests with 2˚C of warming

Changing climate is altering the amount of carbon that can be sustained in forest ecosystems. Increasing heat and drought are already causing increased mortality and decreased regeneration in some locations. These changes have implications for landscape carbon storage with ongoing climate change. We used a climate analogs approach to project aboveground forest carbon density under +2 °C warming above the pre-industrial climate for western US forests. We calculated analogs for the current climate and under +2 °C warming and associated carbon density for each time period. We found that in most ecoregions, maximum carbon density values are projected to decline, and the interquartile range of carbon density values is projected to narrow. Using mean carbon density values, we project a 796 Tg decline in landscape carbon storage across the western US. As tree mortality increases, the transition from live to dead carbon will increase fuel buildup and fire hazard in many ecosystems. Greater fire..., , # Decreasing landscape carbon storage in western US forests with 2˚C of warming

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.1g1jwsv9g](10.5061/dryad.1g1jwsv9g)

## Description of the data and file structure

These data and code are for the manuscript 'Decreasing landscape carbon storage in western US forests with 2˚C of warming'. Data are from publicly available sources, including TerraClimate and TreeMap. The code uses these data to calculate analogs of carbon density under the projected +2 degrees C climate data from TerraClimate.

**Usage Notes:**

* **CSV**: Text files storing tabular data where rows represent observations and columns represent variables; viewable in text editors, spreadsheets, or analytical tools like R.
* **TIFF/TIF**: Spatially referenced raster image files used for landscape data (e.g., vegetation, topography); viewable in GIS software or R.
* **SHP**: Shapefiles store vector GIS data (points, lines, polygons) for geographic features; require accompanying files (.dbf, .prj, et...,