Background and timeline
The Oregon Board of Forestry and the Department of Forestry prioritized forest carbon accounting in 2003 with the implementation of the Forest Carbon Indicator, one of 19 Indicators of Sustainable Forest Mgt. These Indicators comprised the monitoring component of the Forestry Program for Oregon, which is the strategic document for the Board of Forestry. The indicators were patterned after the Montreal Process Criteria and Indicators program, which provides a common framework for member countries to monitor, assess, and report on trends of national forests and progress toward sustainable forest management. Agency science staff worked with Dr. Mark Harmon at Oregon State University to generate the first set of estimates for the indicator using the LandCarb modeling framework.
In 2007, the Oregon Legislature established the Global Warming Commission with a list of mandates. Under ORS 468A.259(i), an accurate forest carbon accounting is required to meet the directive to the Oregon Global Warming Commission (OGWC) to "track and evaluate the carbon sequestration potential of Oregon's forests, alternative methods of forest management that can increase carbon sequestration and reduce the loss of carbon sequestration to wildfire, changes in the mortality and distribution of tree and other plant species and the extent to which carbon is stored in tree-based building materials."
An agreement was reached between the Global Warming Commission and the Board of Forestry to combine efforts in further developing and enumerating the stock and flux of carbon in Oregon's forests. One of these efforts was assembling a forest carbon taskforce in 2010 and again in 2016 to draft a report that provides a baseline estimate of carbon in Oregon's forests and how that carbon flows through each pool. The Task Force concluded that the long-term monitoring data collected by the
The Forest Inventory Analysis Program (FIA) was the most reliable and trusted source of data for forest carbon accounting in Oregon and all other forests in the U.S.
The FIA Program, within the Resource Monitoring and Assessment Division of the U.S. Forest Service, conducts an annual inventory of the nation's forests with a 10-year remeasurement cycle for Oregon. FIA has developed a forest sector carbon accounting methodology that complies with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines for forest carbon accounting.
Forest Ecosystem Carbon Report
In the 2018 Session, the Legislature established the Office of Carbon Policy and included funding to further develop an assessment of the amount of carbon in Oregon's forests. With this funding, preliminary estimates of the stock and flux of carbon in Oregon's forests were generated based on remeasurements of 60% of all field plots and a final
Oregon Forest Ecosystem Carbon Report was produced.
In 2024, the FIA Program published forest monitoring data that included the full set of remeasured plots in Oregon along with estimates of the stock and flux of carbon using newly developed volume and biomass equations that are consistent across all forests of the U.S. This
presentation includes a set of graphics that illustrate these new estimates organized by ownership and ecoregion. A comparison between the new estimates with those in the initial report will not be reliable since these latest forest carbon estimates were generated with the new National System for Volume and Biomass (NSVB). Work on a final report based on these estimates will begin in July 2025.
Harvested wood products carbon
Oregon Department of Forestry partnered with the FIA Program and the Bureau of Business and Economic Research (BBER), to conduct an analysis on the stock and flux of carbon in wood products. The Oregon Harvested Wood Products Carbon Inventory Report focuses on the history of timber harvest from Oregon's forests from 1906 to 2017 and tracks the storage and flux of carbon from those harvests through the pools of wood products and disposal.
Estimates for the storage and flux of carbon through harvested wood products are generated using a deterministic model based on IPCC Tier 3 production accounting approach. This approach is characterized as the most detailed and complex method within the IPCC guidelines, focusing on calculating the carbon stored in all wood products produced within a specific region or country, considering the product from harvest to final disposal. It tracks the carbon within a country's production boundaries rather than just consumption or atmospheric flow.
Estimates are based on timber harvested from Oregon's forests only, which means it does not include harvests outside of Oregon. The input data representing the time series of timber harvest is separate from, and independent of, the FIA forest monitoring data. This methodology has been adopted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Oregon Department of Forestry partnered with Cal Fire and the Bureau of Business and Economic research at University of Montana to have the model reprogrammed in R statistical software and build an online application that anyone can use by accessing the
website. A set of graphics from output of the model and a full description of the wood products model can be found at this website, in second part of this
presentation, and in Stockman et. al. (2012) accessible at this
website.
Oregon Sawmill Energy Report
Oregon Department of Forestry partnered with the FIA Program and the Bureau of Business and Economic Research (BBER), to conduct an analysis of all on-site energy consumed and produced at sawmills in Oregon during 2017. The study was completed by BBER. View the Oregon Sawmill Energy Report 2017.
Simulating forest management scenarios
Modeling a forest carbon budget is generally considered essential for evaluating the outcomes of different potential forest management scenarios to better understand the potential of the forest sector in mitigating industrial carbon emissions.
In 2019, Oregon Department of Forestry partnered with American Forests to simulate forest carbon consequences of alternative forest management scenarios using the Carbon Budget Model. After the pandemic-related delay, analysts with American Forests have completed a series of simulations, have evaluated the results, and are currently preparing a manuscript. A full description of the model can be accessed at this
website.