Forests are responsible for approximately 90% of all terrestrial carbon storage and are key regulators of the global carbon cycle. Moreover, strategies like forest conservation, reforestation, and improved forest management are widely viewed as promising avenues for natural carbon removal that confer a host of environmental and economic additional benefits. Yet, at scales ranging from individual sites to the entire globe, estimates of forest carbon uptake and storage vary by considerably. This uncertainty stymies efforts to confirm regional and global carbon budget estimates, and prevents robust evaluations of the potential of forest-based carbon removal strategies. Much of this uncertainty stems from a misalignment between our state-of-the-art understanding of forest carbon removal and the decades-old tools used to estimate it in practice. The overall goal of this project is to address these discrepancies using the best-available science, testing the central prediction that conventional monitoring approaches systematically underestimate how much carbon is removed from the atmosphere by undisturbed forests. This project will blend state-of-the-art field observations and synthesis of environmental network data to understand why measurement approaches give different results. The PI and her team will also develop novel techniques for more accurate forest carbon quantification that bridge field monitoring and regional to global-scale policy setting. To accelerate the transition o