Biomass carbon of truncated diameter classes in Indian forests

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

One major uncertainty in estimating terrestrial carbon flux is the biomass density of the forests being cleared or re-growing. Several studies estimated the forest biomass density in different ways. But most of the studies have focused on forest volume inventories in estimating biomass of different forest types. The major drawback of these inventories is that they often report stand/stock tables only above a minimum diameter, reflecting the dominant interest in inventories of commercial volumes. Especially, in countries like India, where most of the forests are disturbed, they might contain important proportions of the stand biomass. The paper estimates the missing number of trees in the inventories using the frequency of stems in the higher diameter classes. Once the stem frequencies have been estimated completed stand tables may be used for biomass estimation. The study concludes that the error of omission of these small diameter classes is substantial as the inventories fail to include 29.7% of the total stand biomass.