Vital Research Being Done at Howland Research Forest
John Lee, a University of Maine Center for Research on Sustainable Forests researcher and the Howland site manager, has been quietly churning out groundbreaking data about climate change and carbon sequestration. Lee and partners at the U.S. Forest Service, NASA and other institutions have created one of the world’s best records of atmospheric flux, measuring the exchange of carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, and energy entering and leaving the forest (i.e., the forest-atmosphere exchange). This, along with the many ancillary ecological and atmospheric data measurement systems, provides valuable information about how forests sequester carbon and interact with the climate system.
The Press Herald story on Howland Research Forest and its vital role in understanding our changing climate can be found here.