By David Weinstein

Cornell President David Skorton signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment in February 2007, pledging that Cornell would work over the next two years to develop a plan to reduce to zero the total net emissions of greenhouse gases associated with the university's campus operations.

Cornell Plantations forest

What role does Cornell Plantations have in helping to achieve this goal? Plantations manages approximately 4,400 acres of natural areas and gardens that, through photosynthesis, are continuously removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequestering that carbon for long-term storage in the form of stems and roots. The students in a university class I teach with Tim Fahey, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Natural Resources and chair of the Plantations Natural Areas Committee, made it their goal to calculate exactly how much carbon these plants are currently sequestering and how much they are likely to remove over the next half-century. This class also figured out how much the current rate of carbon sequestration could be accelerated on an additional 10,000 acres of (non-Plantations) farms and forests by using a wide variety of innovative management techniques, such as the planting of willow and switchgrass biomass crops and the selective removal of biomass from forests.

Unlike these farm and forest lands, Cornell Plantations natural areas are unlikely to be actively managed for the purpose of increasing carbon sequestration, because an enormous amount of sequestration is already happening through natural processes. By applying the U.S. Forest Service's sophisticated computer models to Plantations inventories of the ages and plant communities of its natural areas, estimates can be made of the standing biomass and growth potential of these forests, fens, old fields, and grasslands. The class tested the models' predictions against local forest growth records. In the very near future, we should have a good idea of the contribution Plantations is making to reaching Cornell's carbon neutrality goal.

David Weinstein is a senior research associate in the Department of Natural Resources and former chair of the Plantations Advisory Board.