Federal Land Management, Carbon Sequestration, and Climate Change in the Southeastern US: A Case Study with Fort Benning

Land use activities can have a major impact on the temporal trends and spatial patterns of regional land-atmosphere exchange of carbon. Federal lands generally have substantially different land management strategies from surrounding areas, and the carbon consequences have rarely been quantified and assessed. Using the Fort Benning Installation as a case study, we used the General Ensemble biogeochemical Modeling System (GEMS) to simulate and compare ecosystem carbon sequestration between the U.S. Army's Fort Benning and surrounding areas from 1992 to 2050. Our results indicate that the military installation sequestered more carbon than surrounding areas from 1992 to 2007 (76.7 vs 18.5 g C m(-2) yr(-1)), and is projected to continue sequestering more carbon from 2008 to 2050 (75.7 vs 25.6 g C m(-2) yr(-1)), mostly because of the proactive management approaches adopted on military training lands. Our results suggest that federal lands might play a positive and important role in sequestering and conserving atmospheric carbon because some anthropogenic disturbances (e.g., urbanization, forest harvesting, and agriculture) can be minimized or prevented on federal lands.