Carbon Science Delivery Platform

The USDA Forest Service-sponsored platform will serve as the primary means by which methods and data from the Managed Forest Systems chapter within the ‘USDA Quantifying Greenhouse Gas Fluxes: Methods for Entity-Scale Inventory’ are delivered in a consolidated, user-friendly format. This aligns with a U.S. Forest Service objective to serve as the primary source of information on carbon and carbon flows across U.S. forests, through economies and into communities potentially displacing more greenhouse gas intensive consumption, while potentially reducing probabilities of forest conversion and declines in forest health. Potential future revised versions of the Entity Guidelines will be incorporated into the platform as it is developed.

• Provide high-quality carbon data on forests and harvested wood products, enabling consistent holistic reporting at three starting points: the landowner, manufacturer, and end-user. 
• Combine Forest Inventory Analysis data and other non-proprietary sources of forest sector inventory data with tools, technologies, and approaches to enable forest owners to determine the forest carbon stock impacts of forest management regimes for various forest types or species compositions including in regional and localized geographies across the country. 
• Use published cradle-to-gate wood product manufacturing lifecycle analysis and environmental product declarations to report the embodied (emissions associated with materials or construction processes) carbon in harvested wood products. 
• Calculate the embedded (stored) carbon in manufactured forest products and estimate the carbon displacement impact of harvested wood products using substitution factors found in published literature.