Landscape carbon accumulation through reductions in emissions (L-CARE): developing brownfield managment protocols for carbon sequestration and habitat use

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Brownfield management represents an important opportunity for carbon (C) sequestration and storage to helpmeet industrial climate change mitigation targets. C is four times more plentiful in the terrestrial biosphere thanin the atmosphere, but conventional ecosystem management for climate change mitigation can be controversial.The OBJECTIVE of this research program is to quantify how massive sulfur and metal emissions reductions inOntario's largest mining and smelting centre, coupled with novel ecosystem reclamation practices, lead to Csequestration and influence the underlying processes of primary production, mineralization, and C and energytransfer through ecosystems. This research program will facilitate important economic and environmentalopportunities for our partners, Vale and Sudbury-INO (Glencore). Our preliminary estimate of 30y C storagepotential in managed Sudbury uplands relative to un-reclaimed lands is 5Mt representing ~$500 million.However a unique and important focus of our study relative to other C sequestration initiatives is onwatershed linkages between C pools, recognizing that C is not static, but continuously exchanging betweenuplands, wetlands and lakes (the landscape receptors) and the atmosphere. We will focus on upland, wetland,and lake systems and their linkages and the data will feed to a scaling and integration team, who will useremote sensing approaches and integrative accounting approaches to scale up trial plots to landscape scales toproject future C sequestration potentials. This work will also serve as an important set of case studies to guideindustrial management of brownfield environments for C sequestration elsewhere in Ontario and Canada.The research program will provide an excellent training environment for both applied and fundamentalaspects of C and GHG cycling and management across complex industrial landscapes, facilitating HQPinteractions with industry and government partners and with co-applicants and partners across 8 universities, 2partner and 2 collaborator companies, 3 government agencies and by using multidisciplinary approachesspanning from the gene-to-field-to-landscape (modelling) scales.