Improving National forest inventory-based carbon stock change estimates for greenhouse gas inVENTories

Forest land in Europe annually sequesters atmospheric carbon (C) comparable to the emissions from the agricultural or industrial process sectors. Despite its importance, the full potential of carbon sequestration on forest land in climate change mitigation strategies is not utilized. In large part, this is due to high uncertainties. It is a premise for INVENT that improving methodology for estimating forest C stock changes to be reported at national or sub-national scale, will result in increasing accuracy and decreasing uncertainty and facilitate the mobilization of the mitigation potential of forest land in Europe. INVENT uses national forest inventory data with remote sensing data on canopy cover dynamics to improve the estimation of national scale living biomass losses. Results indicate a large potential for improvement (up to a factor of 3 compared to the standard approach). Living biomass losses are typically a large and uncertain element in the forest living biomass estimation. Mapping C stocks in forest soils may increase the options for national as well as sub-national reporting methods. Using remotely sensed and map data (10 m resolution) with soil inventory data to establish forest soil C maps indicates that such co-variates have limited predictive strength but that site specific covariates show better explanatory strength for soil C stocks. Mapping soil C stocks in poorly drained soil rely on accurate positioning (x/y error< 1 m) for use with high-resolution topographic covariates, e.g. Lidar based digital elevation models.

- Methods for increasing the precision of living biomass carbon loss and soil carbon change estimates in national GHG inventories were developed. - Fine spatial resolution of harvest monitoring was verified and utilized in GHG inventories. - The increased precision and spatial resolution all provides relevant information for the evaluation and planning of mitigation measures.

Forest land in Europe annually sequesters atmospheric carbon comparable to the emissions from the agricultural or industrial process sectors. Despite its importance, the full potential of carbon sequestration on forest land in climate change mitigation strategies is not utilized. In large part, this is due to the high uncertainty of carbon stock change estimates of living biomass and forest mineral soil using current national-level methods. New estimation methods, which increase the spatial resolution of estimates by incorporating existing auxiliary data sources, are required to further mobilize the mitigation potential of forest land in Europe. INVENT will use national forest inventory, spatially-explicit remote sensing, and local forest harvest data to increase the precision and spatial resolution of living biomass estimates. INVENT will use forest and soil inventory data, spatially-explicit remote sensing data, and modeling procedures to increase the accuracy and spatial resolution of forest mineral soil carbon stock change estimates. INVENT will apply the developed methods to quantify the effects of forest mitigation measures at the national and sub-national scales. The derived methods and their application will be demonstrated in national greenhouse gas inventories and in case-studies that strengthen the trans-national exchange of knowledge within the consortium countries of Denmark, Latvia, Norway, and Sweden. The results will demonstrate the general applicability of the derived methods to reduce the uncertainty in living biomass and forest mineral soil carbon estimates in greenhouse gas reporting on forest land.