In the middle are the temperate, broadleaf forests of Europe and the United States and the undisturbed tropical rain forests, which both average 25 meters (82 feet) tall. Boreal forests of spruce, fir, pine, and larch usually reach less than 20 meters (66 feet) into the sky. The tallest tree canopies are the temperate conifer forests-full of Douglas fir, western hemlock, redwood, and sequoia-that often grow taller than 40 meters (131 feet). The result was a map showing the world’s tallest forests clustered in the Pacific Northwest of North America and in portions of Southeast Asia, with shorter forests covering broad swaths across Canada and Eurasia. The first step toward answering those questions is to figure out just how much carbon our trees store right now. But would it help to plant more trees? To cut down fewer? And does it matter where those trees are? Making something like an economic argument, some people suggest that we can “grow” our way out of trouble by making (or keeping) the landscape greener. Trees are often held up as a solution to our carbon budget problem. Repeating those measurements over years, decades, and centuries would then help us understand how carbon is moving around the planet. So if you can estimate the biomass of all the trees in all the forests, you can estimate how much carbon is being stored on land. A rule of thumb for ecologists is that the amount of carbon stored in a tree equals 50 percent of its dry biomass. The key measurement is biomass, or the total mass of organisms living within a given area. So one of the most important things we can do for understanding the carbon budget is to get a better inventory of the carbon we have in our trees.”
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“And the biggest natural source of carbon on land is also the forest. “The biggest natural sink of terrestrial carbon lies in our forests and trees,” says Steve Running, a forest ecologist at the University of Montana.