Monitoring Environmental Benefits for Aggregated Small Forest Landowners

The primary beneficiaries of this project will be small tree farmers across the nation. This project will also assist other small landowner groups looking to measure and value their environmental services contributions in a more cost effective, accurate, and efficient manner. While carbon markets have had significant attention in recent year and much work has been done to measure and monetize the sequestration on forestlands, smaller growers (less than 1,000 acres) still have no real way to participate in these emerging markets and few incentives for adapting their management to sequester more carbon (existing aggregation protocols and current carbon prices represent too much risk for little return for smaller projects). This project is designed to address that need by developing scientifically rigorous protocols for the monitoring of a variety of environmental services specifically for small and aggregated landowners. This will lead to increased access to carbon markets and other environmental services market and incentives programs and provide new decision making tools for both foresters and landowners to determine which variables to measure and at what scale and if measurement will be cost effective.