New above and belowground biomass carbon map

This new global map of biomass carbon stored in above and belowground  living vegetation, circa 2005, was created following the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Good Practice Guidance for reporting national greenhouse  gas inventories.  The map is based on the MODIS MOD12 land cover map produced for the year 2005, which has a spatial resolution of 500m by 500m.  Specifically, the authors synthesized and mapped the IPCC Tier -1 default values using the global land cover map stratified by continent, ecoregion and forest disturbance level.  This will be the first database to provide a globally  consistent and spatially  explicit estimate of  vegetation carbon stocks, circa 2005,  following the IPCC standardized methodology.  This new dataset provides key benchmarks for climate policy negotiations and decisions by allowing globally-consistent estimates of the amount of carbon stored in living above and below ground vegetation at regional, national, and in some cases, sub-national scales.

 

 

The Terrestrial Carbon Group and University of East Anglia are using this map and underlying data in their analysis of terrestrial carbon at risk of emission across developing countries, which will be released before the UNFCCC talks in Copenhagen.

Data release anticipated in Spring 2010.  A similar database for the  
year 2000 is available here: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/global_carbon/carbon_documentation.html

Data caveats and limitation:  The database is appropriate for regional  to global assessments only.  The methods employed here are not  directly linked to ground-based measures of carbon stocks and have not  been validated with field data.  Variation within vegetation types is likely masked, meaning that the actual carbon storage in a given  
location could be more or less than indicated.  Consequently, the database should be used to only as a starting point for many analyses, and studies aiming to provide more refined estimates will need to collect and analyze site-specific information.

Contact Holly Gibbs (hgibbs@stanford.edu) for more information.

Citation: Ruesch, A.S., and H.K.  Gibbs. 2009. Updated global biomass map for the year 2005 based on IPCC Tier-1 Methodology. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (in review).