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Cover Story

Discovery, Research Group Maps Canada's Massive Carbon Reservoir

Postdoctoral fellow Camile Söthe led a two-year study in Alemu Gonsamo’s Remote Sensing Laboratory, creating the first ever map that shows where, and how much, carbon is stored in Canada’s ecosystem. Turns out there are billions of tonnes, making this country pivotal in the fight against climate change. The lab partnered with the World Wildlife Fund Canada and presented their findings at the annual United Nations climate change conference.

World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Canada reached out to Alemu Gonsamo and his research team in 2019 with a huge coast to coast to coast request.  

The country’s largest international conservation organization wanted to know how much organic carbon is stored in Canada’s land ecosystems.  

“They were looking for specific data that would inform their conservation activities,” says Alemu, assistant professor in the School of Earth, Environment & Society and a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Remote Sensing of Terrestrial Ecosystems. “Unfortunately, I had to tell them that existing data was not sufficient to develop conservation policies on a national scale. That’s where our collaboration all began.” 

Last November, Alemu and the team in his Remote Sensing Laboratory presented Canada’s first carbon map to overwhelmingly positive reception at the COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. Coverage in the Globe and Mail and CBC News underscored the importance of their research for the movement against climate change as well as Canadian conservation efforts. The team received a flood of emails from potential collaborators after the conference.

Alemu Gonsamo, assistant professor, School of Earth, Environment & Society and postdoctoral fellow Camile Söthe.

“We never had doubts about our technical capacity to see this project through to the end,” says Camile. “From the beginning, the greatest challenge was finding the data we needed.”

In the beginning, though, the success of the Mapping Canada’s Carbon Landscape study was not a foregone conclusion. Camile Söthe, the postdoctoral fellow in Alemu’s lab who led the study, faced the daunting challenge of compiling and analyzing tens of thousands of field measurements to create a comprehensive map of the carbon stored in Canada’s plants and soils.

“Knowing where carbon is stored in Canada allows us to strategically protect and manage the right places to prevent billions of tonnes of carbon from being released into the atmosphere,” says Megan Leslie, WWF-Canada President and CEO. “Protecting these areas will also benefit wildlife by safeguarding habitat for important species at risk.”

The Remote Sensing Laboratory was a natural partner for WWF-Canada because of its ability to process vast quantities of data — in the case of Canada’s carbon stocks, more than five terabytes worth of data collected from nine million square kilometers of diverse land ecosystems.

To make sense of all this data, Camile and a handful of student assistants used a machine learning algorithm to estimate carbon content based on satellite data. In addition to the final carbon stocks, they produced uncertainty maps that spatially indicate confidence intervals of their estimates.

Our project lays the groundwork for future studies to understand how vulnerable carbon stocks are to decomposition, harvesting, fires and other carbon removal actions.

After launching the project in January 2020, they spent the next eight months scouring the World Soil Information Service and other publicly available sources for soil data. Unfortunately, much of the data they were seeking was held privately by government entities and researchers. Canada’s peatlands, carbon-rich wetlands that account for more than 12 per cent of the country’s surface area, were particularly underrepresented in available data. After months of digging, they were able to fill in the missing pieces through a data source created by Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.

The team then turned to Canada’s National Forest Inventory for plant data before realizing that none of this data came with location information more specific than a 10-kilometer radius. To identify data with precise location information, they connected with provincial authorities with more open data policies.

Our work demonstrated that Canada’s soils hold one-fifth of the world’s soil carbon stock. Decisions made here can impact the entire world.

After two years of painstaking work, supported by Maple Leaf Foods and the Metcalf Foundation, the Mapping Canada’s Carbon Landscape study produced a comprehensive map indicating 327 billion tonnes of carbon stored in Canada’s ecosystem. The map will inform WWF-Canada’s 10-year plan to restore one million hectares of lost complex ecosystems, protect 100 million hectares of habitat and reduce carbon emissions by 30 million tonnes. At a local level, it will drive action on WWF projects like carbon preservation in the Wolastoq/Saint John River watershed by quantifying the amount of carbon saved by protecting the area. 

“Our project lays the groundwork for future studies to understand how vulnerable carbon stocks are to decomposition, harvesting, fires and other carbon removal actions,” says Camile.

Since unveiling their carbon map, the team has been approached by organizations such as U.S. Global Forest Watch, Woodwell Climate Research Center, Canada Nature Conservancy and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations with offers to help them refine their data or use it to build a case for more robust conservation activities. “Now that we have presented our findings to the [Canadian] Minister of Environment and Climate Change, in addition to other policymakers, we expect to see more policies regarding industrial activities in carbon-rich areas,” says Alemu. 

As Camile continues to refine the carbon map with the help of a growing list of supporters, she has high hopes for the map’s potential to spur tangible action. “Our work demonstrated that Canada’s soils hold one-fifth of the world’s soil carbon stock,” she reflects. “Decisions made here can impact the entire world. I’m looking forward to continuing work on this project as a strategy to fight climate change.”

Planting a carbon sink forest

Researchers, students and community partners are growing a carbon sink forest near McMaster University to aid in the global fight against climate change.

The carbon sink forest is the latest initiative from the McMaster Centre for Climate Change, one of five research centres and institutes in the Faculty of Science. 

In 2002, the Centre’s Director and Faculty of Science Research Chair Altaf Arain established the Turkey Point Observatory in Southern Ontario. Its five research sites measure the impact of climate change and extreme weather on carbon uptake, storage and water use in diverse forest ecosystems. 

The observatory is an integral part of major international networks studying the Earth’s energy, carbon and water cycles. More than 100 peer-reviewed papers have used observatory datasets created by Centre researchers in collaboration with international research groups.

The carbon sink forest will add to that research. Work began in late 2021 to plant 1,000 trees, with support from Trees for Hamilton, Nature at McMaster and the McMaster Academic Sustainability Program. The growth and health of each tree will be tracked and reported.

McMaster Centre for Climate Change Director Altaf Arain

The carbon sink forest will be used to answer fundamental research questions:

  • How much carbon will the 1,000 trees absorb, and at what age? 
  • At what age will the trees maximize their carbon uptake?  
  • How will changing environmental conditions affect forest growth and carbon uptake? 
  • What mix of plant species will promote the most carbon uptake and develop a forest resilient to climate change?  

Altaf and his team will share their research findings with any organizations interested in planting forests that absorb and store carbon out of the atmosphere to mitigate climate change.