A map of African humid tropical forest aboveground biomass derived from management inventories

Archive ouverte

Ploton, Pierre | Mortier, Frédéric | Barbier, Nicolas | Cornu, Guillaume | Réjou-Méchain, Maxime | Rossi, Vivien | Alonso, Alfonso | Bastin, Jean-Francois | Bayol, Nicolas | Benedet, Fabrice | Bissiengou, Pulcherie | Chuyong, Georges | Demarquez, Benoît | Doucet, Jean-Louis | Droissart, Vincent | Kamdem, Narcisse Guy | Kenfack, David | Memiaghe, Herve | Moses, Libalah | Sonké, Bonaventure | Texier, Nicolas | Thomas, Duncan, C. | Zebaze, Donatien | Pelissier, Raphaël | Gourlet-Fleury, Sylvie

Edité par CCSD ; Nature Publishing Group -

International audience. Forest biomass is key in Earth carbon cycle and climate system, and thus under intense scrutiny in the context of international climate change mitigation initiatives (e.g. REDD+). In tropical forests, the spatial distribution of aboveground biomass (AGB) remains, however, highly uncertain. There is increasing recognition that progress is strongly limited by the lack of field observations over large and remote areas. Here, we introduce the Congo basin Forests AGB (CoFor-AGB) dataset that contains AGB estimations and associated uncertainty for 59,857 1-km pixels aggregated from nearly 100,000 ha of in situ forest management inventories for the 2000 – early 2010s period in five central African countries. A comprehensive error propagation scheme suggests that the uncertainty on AGB estimations derived from c. 0.5-ha inventory plots (8.6–15.0%) is only moderately higher than the error obtained from scientific sampling plots (8.3%). CoFor-AGB provides the first large scale view of forest AGB spatial variation from field data in central Africa, the second largest continuous tropical forest domain of the world.

Suggestions

Du même auteur

Pan-tropical prediction of forest structure from the largest trees

Archive ouverte | Bastin, Jean-Francois | CCSD

International audience. Aim Large tropical trees form the interface between ground and airborne observations, offering a unique opportunity to capture forest properties remotely and to investigate their variations o...

Unveiling African rainforest composition and vulnerability to global change

Archive ouverte | Réjou-Méchain, M. | CCSD

International audience. Africa is forecasted to experience large and rapid climate change1 and population growth2 during the twenty-first century, which threatens the world’s second largest rainforest. Protecting an...

Spatial validation reveals poor predictive performance of large-scale ecological mapping models

Archive ouverte | Ploton, Pierre | CCSD

International audience. Mapping aboveground forest biomass is central for assessing the global carbon balance. However, current large-scale maps show strong disparities, despite good validation statistics of their u...

Chargement des enrichissements...