Understanding tropical deforestation drivers to develop land use specific carbon emission factors
Abstract
Remote sensing combined with field measurements can provide continuous and spatially explicit above-ground biomass (AGB) estimates, which can be valuable for the quantification of carbon stocks and emission factors (EFs). Unfortunately, there is little information on the fate of the land following tropical deforestation and of the associated carbon stock. We assessed post-deforestation land use across the tropics for the period 1990 - 2000. This dataset was then combined with a pan-tropical AGB map at 30 m resolution to assess spatial dynamics of EFs from forest conversion by taking into account the follow-up land use. In Latin America, pasture was the most common post-deforestation land use (72%), with large-scale cropland (11%) a distant second. In Africa deforestation was often followed by small-scale cropping (61%) with a smaller role for pasture (15%). In Asia, small-scale cropland was the dominant agricultural follow-up land use (35%), closely followed by tree crops (28%). EFs showed high spatial variation within eco-zones and countries. While our EFs are only representative for the types of land use change that occurred during the studied time period, our results show that emission factors are mainly determined by the initial forest carbon stock; however, the estimates of the fraction of carbon lost were less dependent on initial forest biomass. This offers opportunities for countries to use these fractions in combination with recent good quality national forest biomass maps or inventory data to quantify emissions from specific forest conversions. Our study highlights that the co-location of data on forest loss, biomass and fate of the land provides more insight into the spatial dynamics of land use change and can help in attributing carbon emissions to human activities.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMGC42C..12D
- Keywords:
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- 1622 Earth system modeling;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1632 Land cover change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1640 Remote sensing;
- GLOBAL CHANGE