© 1991 Heron Publishing—Victoria, Canada
The concept of closure in calculating carbon balance of forests: accounting for differences in spatial and temporal scales
of component processes
E. David Ford (1) and Robert O. Teskey (2)
1. Center for Quantitative Science, HR-20, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA / 2. School of Forest Resources, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA /
Summary
The concept of closure, which has been used extensively to calculate the heat and water budgets of forests, has led to advances
in the understanding of how heat and water balances are controlled. The successful construction of closed heat and water budgets
of forests can be attributed to the large scale of input and output fluxes relative to changes in storage, the comparative
ease with which such fluxes can be measured, and the regularity with which forests cycle through discharge and recharge on
diurnal and annual cycles. The applicability of simple, closed budget analysis for carbon balance of forests is less certain
because changes in internal storage, which are of major significance, occur at different time scales for growth and decomposition.
We conclude that carbon balance might best be modeled as an open system. For long-term predictions, the most important processes
to consider are acclimation and adaptation, which occur at different spatial and temporal scales. Construction of a modeling
procedure to accommodate this variation is discussed.
