Assessing Forestry Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sequestration with Comet-FarmTM.

COMET-Farm^TM is an integrated web-based decision support tool developed in collaboration with and support from the NRCS and USDA to aid farmers, agricultural producers, natural resource professionals, land managers and conservationists in making land and livestock management decisions regarding greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sequestration. COMET-Farm^TM provides total farm, ranch and woodlot greenhouse gas accounting, including cropland, pasture, range, agroforestry, forestry, livestock and on-farm/ranch energy use modules.  Forestry is practiced widely in the U.S., and the potential carbon sequestration co-benefits of specialized forestry practices are beginning to be recognized nationally.  With the use of COMET-Farm^TM, users can input information regarding forest stands such as stand boundaries, using a geospatial interface, stand composition, structure, and silvicultural practices. COMET-Farm^TM predicts the contribution of each forest stand’s current and expected future greenhouse gas balances for 50 years into the future. Users can view greenhouse gas balances broadly, such as comparing totals across stands and silvicultural options, and narrowly, such as comparing different carbon stocks (e.g., biomass, forest products) within stands. Using a comprehensive approach, users with mixed agricultural and forest lands can integrate forest practices with other land uses, such as agroforestry, cropland and livestock production, to ascertain the relative impact of their forest management practices. The tool accounts for forest growth and biomass dynamics, harvesting, and the fate of forest products. The tool is firmly grounded scientifically, using GHG inventory methods provided in, Quantifying Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in Agriculture and Forestry: Methods for Entity-Scale Inventory and methods demonstrated in the USDA Forest Service report, Methods for calculating forest ecosystem and harvested carbon with standard estimates for forest types of the United States.  To demonstrate the power of this tool, we showcase the tool’s capabilities to estimate greenhouse gas fluxes on forestland using real-world examples of forestry practices.