Dataset Information

Global Tree Cover and Biomass Carbon on Agricultural Land: The contribution of agroforestry to global and national carbon budgets.

ABSTRACT: Agroforestry systems and tree cover on agricultural land make an important contribution to climate change mitigation, but are not systematically accounted for in either global carbon budgets or national carbon accounting. This paper assesses the role of trees on agricultural land and their significance for carbon sequestration at a global level, along with recent change trends. Remote sensing data show that in 2010, 43% of all agricultural land globally had at least 10% tree cover and that this has increased by 2% over the previous ten years. Combining geographically and bioclimatically stratified Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Tier 1 default estimates of carbon storage with this tree cover analysis, we estimated 45.3?PgC on agricultural land globally, with trees contributing >75%. Between 2000 and 2010 tree cover increased by 3.7%, resulting in an increase of >2?PgC (or 4.6%) of biomass carbon. On average, globally, biomass carbon increased from 20.4 to 21.4?tC ha(-1). Regional and country-level variation in stocks and trends were mapped and tabulated globally, and for all countries. Brazil, Indonesia, China and India had the largest increases in biomass carbon stored on agricultural land, while Argentina, Myanmar, and Sierra Leone had the largest decreases.

SUBMITTER: Zomer RJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4951720 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Global Tree Cover and Biomass Carbon on Agricultural Land: The contribution of agroforestry to global and national carbon budgets.

Zomer Robert J RJ Neufeldt Henry H Xu Jianchu J Ahrends Antje A Bossio Deborah D Trabucco Antonio A van Noordwijk Meine M Wang Mingcheng M

Scientific reports 20160720

Agroforestry systems and tree cover on agricultural land make an important contribution to climate change mitigation, but are not systematically accounted for in either global carbon budgets or national carbon accounting. This paper assesses the role of trees on agricultural land and their significance for carbon sequestration at a global level, along with recent change trends. Remote sensing data show that in 2010, 43% of all agricultural land globally had at least 10% tree cover and that this ...[more]

PMID: 27435095

Similar Datasets

Project description:While we know that deforestation in the tropics is increasingly driven by commercial agriculture, most tropical countries still lack recent and spatially-explicit assessments of the relative importance of pasture and cropland expansion in causing forest loss. Here we present a spatially explicit quantification of the extent to which cultivated land and grassland expanded at the expense of forests across Latin America in 2001-2011, by combining two "state-of-the-art" global datasets (Global Forest Change forest loss and GlobeLand30-2010 land cover). We further evaluate some of the limitations and challenges in doing this. We find that this approach does capture some of the major patterns of land cover following deforestation, with GlobeLand30-2010's Grassland class (which we interpret as pasture) being the most common land cover replacing forests across Latin America. However, our analysis also reveals some major limitations to combining these land cover datasets for quantifying pasture and cropland expansion into forest. First, a simple one-to-one translation between GlobeLand30-2010's Cultivated land and Grassland classes into cropland and pasture respectively, should not be made without caution, as GlobeLand30-2010 defines its Cultivated land to include some pastures. Comparisons with the TerraClass dataset over the Brazilian Amazon and with previous literature indicates that Cultivated land in GlobeLand30-2010 includes notable amounts of pasture and other vegetation (e.g. in Paraguay and the Brazilian Amazon). This further suggests that the approach taken here generally leads to an underestimation (of up to ~60%) of the role of pasture in replacing forest. Second, a large share (~33%) of the Global Forest Change forest loss is found to still be forest according to GlobeLand30-2010 and our analysis suggests that the accuracy of the combined datasets, especially for areas with heterogeneous land cover and/or small-scale forest loss, is still too poor for deriving accurate quantifications of land cover following forest loss.

Dataset Information

Global Tree Cover and Biomass Carbon on Agricultural Land: The contribution of agroforestry to global and national carbon budgets.

Publications

Global Tree Cover and Biomass Carbon on Agricultural Land: The contribution of agroforestry to global and national carbon budgets.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets