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

Aboveground biomass; Management inventories; Forested area; Central Africa; Organic material; Digital curation; Mapping; Climate change; Congo Basin forests

Abstract :

[en] 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.

Disciplines :

Phytobiology (plant sciences, forestry, mycology...)
Environmental sciences & ecology

Author, co-author :

Ploton, Pierre

Mortier, Frédéric

Barbier, Nicolas

Cornu, Guillaume

Réjou-Méchain, Maxime

Rossi, Vivien

Alonso, Alfonso

Bastin, Jean-François ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Monitoring et gestion des données des systèmes agro-env.

Bayol, Nicolas

Bénédet, Fabrice

More authors (15 more)

Language :

English

Title :

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

Publication date :

08 July 2020

Journal title :

Scientific Data

eISSN :

2052-4463

Publisher :

Nature Publishing Group, London, United Kingdom

Volume :

Issue :

221

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Available on ORBi :

since 26 October 2020

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