Page 6 - Impact Winter 2022

ACCOUNTING
FOR CARBON
Managing forests to store carbon is a key approach to lessening the effects of human-induced climate change. Forests sequester more carbon annually than any other land use and have the potential to offset carbon released through energy production, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and forestry.
However, we can’t manage what we can’t measure. So how do we measure, with certainty, the carbon stored in our forest lands? Chad Babock, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Forest Resources, and research associate and master’s student Ethan Emick are taking inventory of carbon stocks at the Cloquet Forestry Center in northeastern Minnesota using a fusion of forest measurements and remote sensing data.
The carbon cycle — a system where carbon in various chemical forms flows from land and water through the atmosphere and back — is fundamental to life on earth, explains Babcock.
“Forests play an important role in this cycle by sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, and releasing carbon through decay and disturbances, such as timber harvests and fire,” he said. “Forests are the largest terrestrial carbon sink on the planet, and managing them to store carbon can be an effective way to offset atmospheric
CO2 emissions.”
Forest carbon has been commoditized through the creation of
forest carbon markets. However, measuring the amount of carbon stored can be prohibitively expensive, especially for small forest landowners. Babcock and Emick are working on a new approach to spatially predict and map forest carbon to help reduce the costs of monitoring.
“There are many ways to map forest carbon with remote sensing data and field observations,” said Emick. “What’s missing is an ability to characterize uncertainty in a way that’s useful for trading. To trade on the market, forest carbon must be estimated with statistical rigor, meaning that any estimates of carbon storage must be statistically defensible.”
The CFANS team’s approach aims to address this issue using light detection and ranging (lidar) data from Minnesota
and Bayesian hierarchical spatial modeling (a statistical model written in multiple levels). The spatial model relates the CFC field
plot observations and the lidar variables, explains Emick, providing excellent predictions and, more importantly, confidence intervals that accurately describe how certain they are in their predictions. Learn more at cfc.cfans.umn.edu.
WASTE NEWLY
PLACED
Did you know that up to 40 percent of the American food supply goes to waste each year? In the U.S. alone, we discard nearly
80 billion pounds. In fact, food waste is the largest category of municipal solid wastes in the country. It takes up significant landfill space and is a major contributor to the greenhouse gas emissions from our food system.
Across the country, animal scientists
and others are searching for solutions to address this issue by turning food waste into animal feed using thermal processing. Gerald Shurson, PhD, professor, and Pedro Urriola, PhD, research associate professor (both in the Department of Animal Science) have been working on ways to recycle food waste into animal feeds since 2014.
Since that time, their extensive, collaborative research with others on numerous studies has yielded promising potential. “We obtained great results showing that the feeding value of several food waste sources is equal to, or exceeds, traditional ingredients like corn and soybean meal for pigs, which could repurpose food waste from being an enormous environmental burden into a valuable resource in pig diets,” said Shurson, who is an author of many related publications, including the recent paper: “What a Waste
— Can We Improve Sustainability in Animal Production Systems by Recycling Food Waste Streams into Animal Feed in an Era of Health, Climate, and Economic Crises?”
“If we’re going to feed a growing population of people, we must first do a better job at preventing food waste and ultimately the
food waste that can’t be prevented must be recycled to the highest possible value, which is feeding it to animals,” he said.