Monitoring and estimating tropical forest carbon stocks: making REDD a reality

By Holly K. Gibbs, Sandra A. Brown, J. Niles, J. Foley. 2007

1,741 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries is of central importance in efforts to combat climate change. Key scientific challenges must be addressed to prevent any policy roadblocks. Foremost among the challenges is quantifying nations’ carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, which requires information on forest clearing and carbon storage. Here we review a range of methods available to estimate national-level forest carbon stocks in developing countries. While there are no practical methods to directly measure all forest carbon stocks across a country, both ground-based and remote-sensing measurements of forest attributes can be converted into estimates of national carbon stocks using allometric relationships. Here we synthesize, map and update prominent forest biomass carbon databases to create the first complete set of national-level forest carbon stock estimates. These forest carbon estimates expand on the default values recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Guidelines and provide a range of globally consistent estimates.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6d28e7b3cb196fc6233340c2b9201e21c6d89a85

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Citations in the corpus

A high-resolution canopy height model of the Earth (2022, neutral): “height or biomass from optical images is a challenging task (Gibbs et al., 2007), as the physical relationships between spectral signatures and vertical forest structure are complex and not well understood (Rodŕıguez-Veiga et al.”
Role of Brazilian Amazon protected areas in climate change mitigation (2010, background): “T forests play a major role in the world’s climate system by storing large stocks of carbon (1) and by regulating energy and water fluxes (2).”
Reducing the error in biomass estimates strongly depends on model selection (2015, methodology): “We also used the dbh:height relationship fitted by Kearsley et al. (2013) at Yangambi to convert twoentries allometric equations (depending on height and dbh) into single-entry equations (depending on dbh alone).”
Pan-tropical monitoring of deforestation (2007, methodology): “Reference data on biomass and accepted procedures to estimate the fluxes are equally essential, as described in Gibbs et al (2007).”
Automated mapping of tropical deforestation and forest degradation: CLASlite (2009, background): “At the national level, it is likely that many tropical countries will rely initially on Tier-I levels of accuracy, yet this approach will provide carbon stock estimates with very large uncertainties [4].”
Benchmark map of forest carbon stocks in tropical regions across three continents (2011, background): “Estimates of GHG emissions from deforestation require information on both the area of forest loss and the corresponding carbon stock of the land that is cleared (8, 9).”
Time, space, place, and the Bonn Challenge global forest restoration target (2017, background): “…who estimated the carbon stocks for forests in Canada, North America, China, Japan, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Eurasia, and South Eastern Asia and Gibbs et al. (2007) who reported 906 Restoration Ecology November 2017 carbon stock estimates for forests in Brazil, Latin America, Sub-Saharan…”
Estimating Individual Tree Height and Diameter at Breast Height (DBH) from Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) Data at Plot Level (2018, background): “canopy cover, atmospheric scattering, and topography, it is difficult for optical remote sensing to provide accurate information about the vertical distribution of the forests [6,7].”
Wood density, phytomass variations within and among trees, and allometric equations in a tropical rainforest of Africa (2010, background): “The forest reserve has a total area of 122 km2 and is classified as wet-evergreen forest type (Hall and Swaine, 1976).”
Manual for building tree volume and biomass allometric equations: from field measurement to prediction (2012, neutral): “1 Estimating the biomass of a biome There is no single method for estimating biomass stocks, but a number of methods depending on the scale considered (Gibbs et al., 2007).”
Re-evaluation of forest biomass carbon stocks and lessons from the world's most carbon-dense forests (2009, methodology): “Biome default values likely under-represent Southern Hemisphere evergreen temperate moist forest types and do not distinguish forest condition caused by land-use history (5).”
Land-use and climate change risks in the Amazon and the need of a novel sustainable development paradigm (2016, background): “processes over tropical South America? Clim Dyn 41(11-12):3127–3143.”