 "Photo: Christina Deparis")
UCF has teamed up with The Nature Conservancy to conduct collaborative research monitoring the carbon storage in natural vegetation at the Disney Wilderness Preserve.
The Disney Wilderness Preserve is a 12,000-acre conservation area located near Kissimmee.
The land consists of mostly flatwoods with scattered wetlands and some higher, dryer habitats, said Doria Gordon, director of conservation science for The Nature Conservancy in Florida.
The Nature Conservancy is an international non-profit conservation organization with a mission to protect biodiversity. The research agreement between The Nature Conservancy and UCF will allow students to come to the preserve and use it as a natural laboratory to research Florida’s natural systems and how to manage them to protect the plants and animals, Gordon said.
“One of the projects we’re about to start, which is very exciting, is to quantify the amount of carbon that is stored in Florida’s native flatwoods,” Gordon said.
UCF conservation biology faculty and graduate students working on their thesis projects will be setting up a monitoring system within the next month to eventually understand the dynamics of carbon storage in natural vegetation communities, said biology professor Charles Ross Hinkle, who is also the chair of the department of biology.
“The goal is to understand how carbon is stored in natural vegetation and to what extent these natural systems remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” Hinkle said.
Flatwoods is a community type in Florida.
Gordon described it as longleaf pine savanna with a very diverse ground cover. One natural process characteristic of flatwoods is that it burns every 2 to 5 years, giving it the open, prairie look.
“A micrometeorological tower system with a carbon dioxide monitoring sensor will be used to evaluate changes in atmospheric concentrations, which can be related to changing environmental conditions and land-use management practices at the site,” Hinkle said.
The tower will be about 6 to 10 feet above the average tree height in the middle of a large flatwoods area.
The sensors that test physiological measurements will be powered by solar cells.
They will measure such weather variables such as rainfall, wind speed, solar radiation and chemicals in the air.
Carbon is the chemical that is of most interest, Gordon said.
“Plants naturally take up carbon during the day, through the process of photosynthesis,” Gordon said. “At night they respire and release carbon back into the air. We will be able to see the day and night dynamics of carbon in the air and will be able to calculate how much carbon is stored in the vegetation and soil.”
Hinkle said it is important to understand how conservation areas contribute to carbon uptake and their role in reducing the effects of rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, which affects global climate change.
Hinkle said carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is one of the causes of global warming.
He said these natural systems are important in helping to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the air.
“We can help the state calculate what capacity the natural systems can store carbon,” Gordon said.
Gordon said areas that have long been unburned store a lot of carbon. If a wildfire occurs, a large amount of carbon is released into the atmosphere quickly and cannot be recaptured rapidly because plants cannot regrow fast enough to retake up the carbon they expelled.
This is a fire hazard. Wild fires are caused by accidents, lightning or arson.
“There hasn’t been that many measurements that actually quantify how much carbon is naturally lost from the natural systems when you begin a prescribed fire and how quickly that carbon is restored by the vegetation,” Gordon said.
Gordon said when there is a prescribed fire in a fire-managed natural system, it regrows rapidly after the burn and it recaptures carbon quickly.
“What we think will happen in an area like the Disney Wilderness Preserve is if fire is managed on a frequent basis, carbon will be sequestered after a fire; It will recapture the net loss of carbon,” Gordon said. “A prescribed fire — one that is started manually every 2 to 3 years to manage the natural systems — doesn’t release as much carbon into the air and it is reabsorbed very rapidly.”
Gordon said that prescribed fires can have a positive impact on the Earth’s atmosphere.
“This is a benefit because of with the global climate changes and the impact of carbon in the atmosphere we need to understand the natural dynamics of carbon so we can use our natural systems to help mitigate the impact,” Gordon said.
Data will be collected for more than a year and then analyzed to develop a model of natural carbon dynamics, Hinkle said.
The partnership with The Nature Conservatory extends beyond the carbon study into a partnership with UCF’s Environmental Initiative, said Alaina Bernard, assistant director of the Environmental Initiative and Arboretum.
“We support each other on prescribed burns and invasive species management, on both properties,” Bernard said.
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