Ottawa, Canada – A new consortium founded by the Université Laval and the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences (CFCAS) will develop a Canada-wide research network that will work to develop a carbon monitoring and prediction system for North America.

The Canadian Carbon Program (CCP) will be funded over the next 3 years by a $4.4 million grant from CFCAS.

The consortium builds on the work of an earlier research network (Fluxnet Canada), to reduce uncertainty in estimates of carbon levels in Canada and North America. The findings will help with development of management strategies for mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change. It will also allow better detection, attribution, adaptation to, and mitigation of the impacts of climate change on Canada’s forests, through improved forest management, says CFCAS.

According CCP Scientific Leader Université Laval professor Hank Margolis, ” the new network will concentrate its work on four major, closely related components : high-precision atmospheric greenhouse concentrations and related isotopes; ecosystem fluxes; regional to continental scale modeling of carbon sources and sinks; and process modelling to support forest carbon accounting and carbon management.”

The product of the CCP will be the development of a scientific framework for reducing uncertainty in estimating the carbon budget of Canada and North America at monthly to multi-annual time scales, through a coordinated program of measurements and modelling. By evaluating the sensitivity of Canadian forests to climate and disturbance, the CCP will analyze and suggest ways to integrate the effects of climate variability into Canada’s forest carbon accounting system and help develop a predictive capability for analyzing the effects of different climate scenarios on future carbon stocks.

The CCP will work in collaboration with government partners (Natural Resources Canada’s Canadian Forest Service, Environment Canada’s Atmospheric Sciences and Technology Directorate, NOAA’s1 Global Monitoring Division), and will measure ecosystem fluxes, atmospheric trace gas concentrations, and ecosystem component processes as well as use existing data from remote sensing of land surface properties and from forest inventories.

The researchers also expect to work in collaboration with related efforts in the U.S. and Mexico within the framework of the North American Carbon Program (NACP).

CFCAS is an independent foundation established in 2000 to support university-based research on weather and climate. CFCAS has invested $109 million of its federal endowment of $110 million in research and training. www.cfcas.org.