Forest carbon accounting tools

The forest carbon accounting team at the Canadian Forest Service has spent decades developing various tools and software to meet Canada’s international forest carbon reporting requirements.

Much of this work is available free-of-charge to the forestry community to:

• encourage the management of forest resources
• reduce carbon emissions
• increase (where appropriate) terrestrial carbon sinks
• help mitigate climate change

These tools and software also support:

• national mitigation analyses
• forest policy development
• decision making

Tools

• Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sector (CBM-CFS3): aspatial forest ecosystem carbon model
• Generic Carbon Budget Model (GCBM): spatially-explicit forest ecosystem carbon model
  • Canadian Model for Peatlands (CaMP): forested peatlands carbon model component of the GCBM
  • Moss-C: moss carbon model component of the GCBM

Software

• Abstract Network Simulation Engine (ANSE): reads and runs harvested wood products (HWP) models that are designed for this software
  • National Forest Carbon Monitoring, Accounting, and Reporting System for Harvested Wood Products (NFCMARS-HWP) model: used by the Canadian Forest Service to produce the annual HWP carbon component of Canada’s national greenhouse gas inventory report
  • Carbon Budget Model for Harvested Wood Products (CBM-HWP): a generic HWP carbon model for training or adaptation purposes