Projected future land change and ecosystem carbon stocks and fluxes for California (ver. 2.0, January 2026)

This dataset consists of annual raster maps of projected future ecosystem carbon stocks and fluxes, land use and land cover (LULC) classes, and LULC transitions for California, U.S. from 2021-2065. Data are simulation model output from the Land Use and Carbon Simulator (LUCAS; Sleeter et al. 2022) run under different future climate and land management scenarios. LUCAS model simulations were conducted on an annual timestep at 1-km spatial resolution under 26 scenarios with 10 Monte Carlo realizations per simulation. The 26 scenarios are different combinations of nine future climate scenarios, two urbanization scenarios, and two vegetation management scenarios. Climate scenarios were based on downscaled output from seven CMIP6 Earth System Models (ACCESS-CM2, CNRM-ESM2-1, EC-Earth3-Veg, HadGEM3-GC31-LL, INM-CM5-0, MPI-ESM1-2-HR, MRI-ESM2-0) run under one to three different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs; Tebaldi et al. 2021) assuming additional radiative forcing by 2100 of 4.5 W m-2 (SSP2-4.5), 7 W m-2 (SSP3-7.0), or 8.5 W m-2 (SSP5-8.5). Climate data were downscaled using a hybrid statistical-dynamical downscaling approach (LOCA2-Hybrid) and are freely available to the public from the Cal-Adapt Analytics Engine Data Catalog. The two urbanization scenarios sampled from historical rates of urban development on an annual basis, with one scenario restricting all new urban development to Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) areas while the other urbanization scenario excluded new urban development from WUI areas (Infill). The two land management scenarios consisted of a "business as usual" (Low) scenario based on historic rates of tree thinning and prescribed burning, while the second land management scenario (High) implemented forest management treatments to reduce wildfire hazard potential that match area targets from California's Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan (California Forest Management Task Force 2021).