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

S Willcock; O L Phillips; P J Platts; A Balmford; N D Burgess; J C Lovett; A Ahrends; J Bayliss; N Doggart; K Doody; E Fanning; J Green; J Hall; K L Howell; R Marchant; Andrew R Marshall; B Mbilinyi; P K T Munishi; N Owen; R D Swetnam; Elmer J Topp-Jorgensen; Simon L Lewis

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0044795

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

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

S Willcock, O L Phillips, P J Platts, A Balmford, N D Burgess, J C Lovett, A Ahrends, J Bayliss, N Doggart, K Doody, …

PLoS One, Vol.7(9), e44795

2012

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0044795

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Abstract

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. © 2012 Willcock et al.

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Title: Towards Regional, Error-Bounded Landscape Carbon Storage Estimates for Data-Deficient Areas of the World
Authors: S Willcock (Author) - University of Leeds, United Kingdom
O L Phillips (Author) - University of Leeds, United Kingdom
P J Platts (Author) - University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
A Balmford (Author) - University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
N D Burgess (Author) - University of Copenhagen, Denmark
J C Lovett (Author) - University of Twente, Netherlands
A Ahrends (Author) - Royal Botanical Garden, United Kingdom
J Bayliss (Author) - University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
N Doggart (Author) - Tansanian Forest Conservation Group, Tanzania
K Doody (Author) - Frankfurt Zoological Society, Germany
E Fanning (Author) - Society for Environmental Exploration, United Kingdom
J Green (Author) - University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
J Hall (Author) - University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
K L Howell (Author) - University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam
R Marchant (Author) - University of York, United Kingdom
Andrew R Marshall (Author) - University of York, United Kingdom
B Mbilinyi (Author) - Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania
P K T Munishi (Author) - Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania
N Owen (Author) - Society for Environmental Exploration, United Kingdom
R D Swetnam (Author) - University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Elmer J Topp-Jorgensen (Author) - University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Simon L Lewis (Author) - University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Publication details: PLoS One, Vol.7(9), e44795
Publisher: Public Library of Science
Date published: 2012
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0044795
ISSN: 1932-6203
Copyright note: Copyright © Willcock et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Organisation Unit: Tropical Forests and People Research Centre; University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland; School of Science, Technology and Engineering; Forest Research Institute
Language: English
Record Identifier: 99451077702621
Output Type: Journal article

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