COSTECH Integrated Repository

Towards Regional, Error-Bounded Landscape Carbon Storage Estimates for Data-Deficient Areas of the World

Show simple item record

dc.creator Willcock, Simon
dc.creator Phillips, Oliver L.
dc.creator Platts, Philip J.
dc.creator Balmford, Andrew
dc.creator Burgess, Neil D.
dc.creator Lovett, Jon C.
dc.creator Ahrends, Antje
dc.creator Bayliss, Julian
dc.creator Doggart, Nike
dc.creator Doody, Kathryn
dc.creator Fanning, Eibleis
dc.creator Green, Jonathan
dc.creator Hall, Jaclyn
dc.creator Howell, Kim
dc.creator Marchant, Rob A.
dc.creator Marshall, Andrew R.
dc.creator Mbilinyi, Boniface P.
dc.creator Munishi, Pantaleo
dc.creator Owen, Nisha
dc.creator Swetnam, Ruth D.
dc.creator Jørgensen, Elmer T.
dc.creator Lewis, Simon L.
dc.date 2016-07-19T13:03:17Z
dc.date 2016-07-19T13:03:17Z
dc.date 2012-09
dc.date.accessioned 2021-05-03T13:29:43Z
dc.date.available 2021-05-03T13:29:43Z
dc.identifier Willcock, S., Phillips, O.L., Platts, P.J., Balmford, A., Burgess, N.D., Lovett, J.C., Ahrends, A., Bayliss, J., Doggart, N., Doody, K. and Fanning, E., 2012. Towards regional, error-bounded landscape carbon storage estimates for data-deficient areas of the world. PLoS One, 7(9), p.e44795.
dc.identifier http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11810/3289
dc.identifier 10.1371/journal.pone.0044795 · Source: PubMed
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11810/3289
dc.description Monitoring landscape carbon storage is critical for supporting and validating climate change mitigation policies. These may be aimed at reducing deforestation and degradation, or increasing terrestrial carbon storage at local, regional and global levels. However, due to data-deficiencies, default global carbon storage values for given land cover types such as 'lowland tropical forest' are often used, termed 'Tier 1 type' analyses by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Such estimates may be erroneous when used at regional scales. Furthermore uncertainty assessments are rarely provided leading to estimates of land cover change carbon fluxes of unknown precision which may undermine efforts to properly evaluate land cover policies aimed at altering land cover dynamics. Here, we present a repeatable method to estimate carbon storage values and associated 95% confidence intervals (CI) for all five IPCC carbon pools (aboveground live carbon, litter, coarse woody debris, belowground live carbon and soil carbon) for data-deficient regions, using a combination of existing inventory data and systematic literature searches, weighted to ensure the final values are regionally specific. The method meets the IPCC 'Tier 2' reporting standard. We use this method to estimate carbon storage over an area of33.9 million hectares of eastern Tanzania, reporting values for 30 land cover types. We estimate that this area stored 6.33 (5.92-6.74) Pg C in the year 2000. Carbon storage estimates for the same study area extracted from five published Africa-wide or global studies show a mean carbon storage value of ∼50% of that reported using our regional values, with four of the five studies reporting lower carbon storage values. This suggests that carbon storage may have been underestimated for this region of Africa. Our study demonstrates the importance of obtaining regionally appropriate carbon storage estimates, and shows how such values can be produced for a relatively low investment. Discover the world's research 100 million publications 2.5 million new publications each month 10 million members Join for free
dc.language en
dc.title Towards Regional, Error-Bounded Landscape Carbon Storage Estimates for Data-Deficient Areas of the World
dc.type Journal Article, Peer Reviewed


Files in this item

Files Size Format View

There are no files associated with this item.

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

Show simple item record

Search COSTECH


Advanced Search

Browse

My Account