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Mapping carbon accumulation potential from global natural forest regrowth.
Journal article

Mapping carbon accumulation potential from global natural forest regrowth.

  • Cook-Patton SC The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA, USA. susan.cook-patton@tnc.org.
  • Leavitt SM The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA, USA.
  • Gibbs D World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, USA.
  • Harris NL World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, USA.
  • Lister K World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, USA.
  • Anderson-Teixeira KJ Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, Front Royal, VA, USA.
  • Briggs RD State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, NY, USA.
  • Chazdon RL World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, USA.
  • Crowther TW ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
  • Ellis PW The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA, USA.
  • Griscom HP James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA, USA.
  • Herrmann V Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, Front Royal, VA, USA.
  • Holl KD University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA.
  • Houghton RA Woods Hole Research Center, Falmouth, MA, USA.
  • Larrosa C Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
  • Lomax G Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.
  • Lucas R Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK.
  • Madsen P InNovaSilva ApS, Vejle, Denmark.
  • Malhi Y Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
  • Paquette A Centre for Forest Research, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
  • Parker JD Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Edgewater, MD, USA.
  • Paul K CSIRO Land and Water, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia.
  • Routh D ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
  • Roxburgh S CSIRO Land and Water, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia.
  • Saatchi S Jet Propulsion Laboratory, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Pasadena, CA, USA.
  • van den Hoogen J ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
  • Walker WS Woods Hole Research Center, Falmouth, MA, USA.
  • Wheeler CE School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
  • Wood SA Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
  • Xu L Jet Propulsion Laboratory, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Pasadena, CA, USA.
  • Griscom BW Conservation International, Arlington, VA, USA.
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  • 2020-09-24
Published in:
  • Nature. - 2020
Carbon
Carbon Sequestration
Conservation of Natural Resources
Data Collection
Environmental Restoration and Remediation
Forestry
Forests
Geographic Mapping
Global Warming
Internationality
Kinetics
Trees
English To constrain global warming, we must strongly curtail greenhouse gas emissions and capture excess atmospheric carbon dioxide1,2. Regrowing natural forests is a prominent strategy for capturing additional carbon3, but accurate assessments of its potential are limited by uncertainty and variability in carbon accumulation rates2,3. To assess why and where rates differ, here we compile 13,112 georeferenced measurements of carbon accumulation. Climatic factors explain variation in rates better than land-use history, so we combine the field measurements with 66 environmental covariate layers to create a global, one-kilometre-resolution map of potential aboveground carbon accumulation rates for the first 30 years of natural forest regrowth. This map shows over 100-fold variation in rates across the globe, and indicates that default rates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)4,5 may underestimate aboveground carbon accumulation rates by 32 per cent on average and do not capture eight-fold variation within ecozones. Conversely, we conclude that maximum climate mitigation potential from natural forest regrowth is 11 per cent lower than previously reported3 owing to the use of overly high rates for the location of potential new forest. Although our data compilation includes more studies and sites than previous efforts, our results depend on data availability, which is concentrated in ten countries, and data quality, which varies across studies. However, the plots cover most of the environmental conditions across the areas for which we predicted carbon accumulation rates (except for northern Africa and northeast Asia). We therefore provide a robust and globally consistent tool for assessing natural forest regrowth as a climate mitigation strategy.
Language
  • English
Open access status
closed
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/199793
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