Forest carbon data for the 2008 US forest national greenhouse gas inventory

This data publication contains forest carbon data estimates developed in part to comply with existing United States (US) commitments for forest carbon stocks and stock-change under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The national greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory is required for UNFCCC Annex 1 parties such as the US, and should be provided to the UNFCCC Secretariat each year by April 15. The estimates were adopted by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which prepares the official annual inventory of US GHG emissions and sinks. This archive provides the forest carbon estimates underlying the summary numbers of EPA (2008) at the most fundamental level: inventory plots collected by the USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory & Analysis (FIA; US Forest Service 2014) for most of the US, but also at the sub-state level which allows for additional coverage due to data limitations at the plot level. Data at these intermediate scales are determined as essential steps in developing the totals, which are available through the EPA publication. The data in this archive may be used for disaggregated analysis and alternate summaries. These carbon estimates for each year 1990 through 2008 reflect forest inventory data publicly available at mid-2007. Much of these underlying FIA data were also used in EPA national GHG inventories in the mid-2000s, and for USDA (2008). Although a partial set of the underlying FIA datasets used may be publicly available, the specific full underlying datasets used are no longer publicly available. GHG inventories published after 2008 through current year are based on much more recent annualized FIA data.
The estimates were developed as a direct extension of the extensive USDA Forest Inventory & Analysis (FIA) inventory data, to characterize stocks and change on US forest lands. The FIA data are the basis for the official forest statistics of the United States, and this approach provides carbon estimates consistent with these data used to provide official US forest resource statistics.
Original metadata date was 12/23/2014. Minor metadata updates were made on 12/14/2016 and 05/04/2020.