Quantifying and Assessing Protected Area's Carbon Sequestration Potential and Ecological Values at Regional-scale

Forest management through the creation and maintenance of conserved areas are a critical strategy for protecting natural resources and mitigating climate change. 17% of the global terrestrial surface now falls within Protected Areas (PAs), and existing research has demonstrated the impact of PAs in preserving biodiversity. However, systematic assessment of the efficacy of PAs for storing forest carbon has not previously been possible at a global scale due to a lack of high-quality vegetation structural information for consistent and accurate forest biomass quantification. In this study, we obtained high spatial resolution (25 m at each footprint) vegetation structural information, estimated aboveground biomass (AGB) from NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission and compared the vegetation characteristics in the PA to its unprotected counterfactuals determined through matching on several key land characters. We focused our analysis on a single PA, the Moyowosi Game Reserve in northwest Tanzania, and used a statistical matching algorithm to compare PA forest structure to forest structure in ecologically similar ecosystems that fall outside of the PA. Our analysis on targeted PA confirmed that the PA possesses greater carbon sequestration potentials and is successful in conserving ecological benefits: vegetation inside the targeted PA presents significantly higher values across several structural metrics including canopy height, canopy cover, and leaf area index than the unprotected regions. Moreover, our results suggest that there is an ~70% average higher forest biomass density in the PA. This study not only presents a prototype methodology for evaluating the effectiveness of PAs for forest biomass preservation that can be extended to other ecosystems, but also highlights establishing conserved areas may provide a key opportunity for forest management toward climate mitigation.