Xu, L;
Saatchi, SS;
Shapiro, A;
Meyer, V;
Ferraz, A;
Yang, Y;
Bastin, J-F;
... Ebuta, D; + view all
(2017)
Spatial Distribution of Carbon Stored in Forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
, 7
, Article 15030. 10.1038/s41598-017-15050-z.
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Abstract
National forest inventories in tropical regions are sparse and have large uncertainty in capturing the physiographical variations of forest carbon across landscapes. Here, we produce for the first time the spatial patterns of carbon stored in forests of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) by using airborne LiDAR inventory of more than 432,000 ha of forests based on a designed probability sampling methodology. The LiDAR mean top canopy height measurements were trained to develop an unbiased carbon estimator by using 92 1-ha ground plots distributed across key forest types in DRC. LiDAR samples provided estimates of mean and uncertainty of aboveground carbon density at provincial scales and were combined with optical and radar satellite imagery in a machine learning algorithm to map forest height and carbon density over the entire country. By using the forest definition of DRC, we found a total of 23.3 ± 1.6 GtC carbon with a mean carbon density of 140 ± 9 MgC ha−1 in the aboveground and belowground live trees. The probability based LiDAR samples capture variations of structure and carbon across edaphic and climate conditions, and provide an alternative approach to national ground inventory for efficient and precise assessment of forest carbon resources for emission reduction (ER) programs.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Spatial Distribution of Carbon Stored in Forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41598-017-15050-z |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-15050-z |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright© The Author(s) 2017. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Te images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Biogeography, Carbon cycle, Forest ecology |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10048850 |
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