Comparative study of above ground biomass estimates for conterminous US

Accurate estimates of forest biomass are important for carbon accounting at both regional and national scale. There are four above ground biomass (AGB) maps available for conterminous US, one from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), two from the United States Forest Service (USFS) (Blackard and Wilson) and one from the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC). Although all four maps are meant to represent similar quantities, spatial patterns of AGB vary considerably from map to map. To use any of these AGB maps for carbon accounting, it is important to understand sources of uncertainty in individual maps and agreement and disagreement among them. Therefore, we compared the four AGB maps at ecoregion and state level to gain understanding of map consistency, leveraging discrepancies among maps to gain insight into the method and data sources. We also developed statewide summaries to compare with FIA forest AGB estimates, which are typically reported at the state level. We examined both absolute differences among these aggregated maps, and relative differences among regions within each map. The result shows that NASA biomass estimates are highest and Blackard estimates are lowest compared to other maps at both ecoregion and state level. The AGB for WHRC and Wilson are very similar at both ecoregion and state level specifically in the lower biomass regions compared to higher biomass regions. This could be associated with the differences in the spatial resolution of the data sources uses to generate these maps. At state level, WHRC map is found to be most similar and NASA biomass estimates least similar to FIA plot data. We discuss these differences in light of the different methods and data sources used to generate the maps.