The USGS is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU partner for research to parameterize, calibrate and run a computer simulation model of soil biogeochemical cycling and sustainable forest practices in the Pacific Northwest.

Both intensive tree production and restoration-oriented forest practices

credit: Wikimedia Commons

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remove biomass that can deplete essential soil nutrients needed to sustain tree growth, timber yield, and habitat development.

In the Pacific Northwest, it is unclear how quickly nutrients are removed by a variety of common forest harvest practices, and how rates of nutrient depletion differ among soils that range naturally from N-limited to N-saturated across basaltic and sedimentary soil parent materials.

What is needed is to parameterize, calibrate, and run a multi-element biogeochemical model that can evaluate rates of soil nutrient supply and depletion in response to varying forestry practices and soil nutrient conditions.

A critical dimension of this work is to simulate nutrient cycling and depletion that go beyond nitrogen (N), and evaluate how differences in soil N fertility affect tree growth and depletion of phosphorus (P), sulfur (S), calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), potassium (K), sodium (Na), and other essential nutrients in forests.