The Canadian Model for Peatlands (CaMP) was developed to address growing international pressure on Canada to better account for greenhouse gas emissions from peatlands in national and international reporting. The CaMP was designed as a module for the Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sector (CBM-CFS) that is used to report on greenhouse gas emissions from Canada’s managed forest area. This presentation will describe the CaMP emphasizing features developed specifically for peatland carbon accounting that are additional to the CBM-CFS3. These include descriptions of peatland types that are modelled and how they are represented in space across Canada, representation of a long-term and annually fluctuating water table, soil and vegetation databases, and wildfire disturbance. We will present the results of a national-scale simulation where greenhouse gas emissions and removals during the past three decades are estimated for 63.9 Mha of peatland across Canada.
Dr. Kelly Bona has worked for Environment and Climate Change Canada for the past year in the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land-Use division, as a specialist in peatland and forested peatland carbon cycling. Previously, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow for the Canadian Forest Services (Natural Resources Canada) where she collaborated with the Carbon Accounting Team to build a model to inform national and international greenhouse gas reporting of peatlands and forested peatlands. She received her PhD at the University of McGill, and wrote her thesis on ‘Understanding and modelling moss-derived carbon in boreal black spruce forests’.
Dr. Kara Webster is a research scientist in Forest Soil Ecology with the Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada. She investigates carbon and nutrient cycling in forest and peatland soils to improve policies for forest sustainability in a changing climate. She combines field monitoring, empirical and ecosystem modelling, and GIS mapping to investigate soil processes across various spatial scales, from plot to landscape.