Abstract
The magnitude of the global terrestrial carbon pool and related fluxes to and from the atmosphere are still poorly known. The European Space Agency P-band radar BIOMASS mission will help to reduce this uncertainty by providing unprecedented information on the distribution of forest above-ground biomass (AGB), particularly in the tropics where the gaps are greatest and knowledge is most needed. Mission selection was made in full knowledge of coverage restrictions over Europe, North and Central America imposed by the US Department of Defense Space Objects Tracking Radar (SOTR) stations. Under these restrictions, only 3% of AGB carbon stock coverage is lost in the tropical forest biome, with this biome representing 66% of global AGB carbon stocks in 2005. The loss is more significant in the temperate (72%), boreal (37%) and subtropical (29%) biomes, with these accounting for approximately 12%, 15% and 7%, respectively, of the global forest AGB carbon stocks. In terms of global carbon cycle modelling, there is minimal impact in areas of high AGB density, since mainly lower biomass forests in cooler climates are affected. In addition, most areas affected by the SOTR stations are located in industrialized countries with well-developed national forest inventories, so that extensive information on AGB is already available. Hence the main scientific objectives of the BIOMASS mission are not seriously compromised. Furthermore, several space sensors that can estimate AGB in lower biomass forests are in orbit or planned for launch between now and the launch of BIOMASS in 2021, which will help to fill the gaps in mission coverage.
Highlights
The magnitude of the terrestrial carbon (C) pool is still poorly known, with estimates of the size of the global forest C reservoir at 861 ± 66 Pg C in 2007, with 363 ± 28 Pg C (~40%) stored in living biomass, of which 262 Pg C (~70%) is in the tropics (Pan et al, 2011)
A forest growing stock volume map for the temperate and boreal regions of the northern hemisphere derived from the European Space Agency (ESA) Environmental Satellite (Envisat) C-band Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) data (Santoro et al, 2011) was combined with allometric relations to generate total C maps, leading to an estimate of 80 ± 30 Pg C of biomass stored in that region (Thurner et al, 2014)
BIOMASS will not be allowed to operate within line of sight of the stations making up the Space Objects Tracking Radar (SOTR) network; this occludes the area shown in Fig. 1, which depicts its impact in terms of global ecological zones (FAO, 2012)
Summary
The magnitude of the terrestrial carbon (C) pool is still poorly known, with estimates of the size of the global forest C reservoir at 861 ± 66 Pg C in 2007, with 363 ± 28 Pg C (~40%) stored in living biomass, of which 262 Pg C (~70%) is in the tropics (Pan et al, 2011). The two pantropical AGB maps (Baccini et al, 2012; Saatchi et al, 2011) used similar input data layers, and are principally based on canopy height data derived from the LiDAR dataset acquired between 2003 and 2009 by the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) sensor onboard the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Ice, Cloud and Elevation Satellite (ICESat) These studies differ in the methods used to derive height from the GLAS data, the ground datasets used for calibration and the spatial modelling methodology; as a result, there are significant regional differences between them, especially across the tropical rainforests (central Amazon, Congo basin, Papua New Guinea), savanna woodlands in Africa (i.e., Miombo) and dry forests and savannas of South America (Mitchard et al, 2013). We discuss the options currently available at the country scale to mitigate the impact of loss of coverage due to the SOTR network
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