Abstract
Carbon stock estimates based on land cover type are critical for informing climate change assessment and landscape management, but field and theoretical evidence indicates that forest fragmentation reduces the amount of carbon stored at forest edges. Here, using remotely sensed pantropical biomass and land cover data sets, we estimate that biomass within the first 500 m of the forest edge is on average 25% lower than in forest interiors and that reductions of 10% extend to 1.5 km from the forest edge. These findings suggest that IPCC Tier 1 methods overestimate carbon stocks in tropical forests by nearly 10%. Proper accounting for degradation at forest edges will inform better landscape and forest management and policies, as well as the assessment of carbon stocks at landscape and national levels.
Highlights
Carbon stock estimates based on land cover type are critical for informing climate change assessment and landscape management, but field and theoretical evidence indicates that forest fragmentation reduces the amount of carbon stored at forest edges
We calculate the effects of tropical forest fragmentation and increased area of forest edges on carbon stocks and document how widespread these effects are across the world
We find that the scale of edge effects on forest biomass (defined as the distance between the forest edge and the point at which 90% of the asymptotic biomass is reached; A(90) in Fig. 1a) is an order of magnitude greater than is typically measured in field studies
Summary
Carbon stock estimates based on land cover type are critical for informing climate change assessment and landscape management, but field and theoretical evidence indicates that forest fragmentation reduces the amount of carbon stored at forest edges. Using remotely sensed pantropical biomass and land cover data sets, we estimate that biomass within the first 500 m of the forest edge is on average 25% lower than in forest interiors and that reductions of 10% extend to 1.5 km from the forest edge These findings suggest that IPCC Tier 1 methods overestimate carbon stocks in tropical forests by nearly 10%. Experimental studies across Brazil have shown that biomass is reduced by between 9 and 50% within 100 m of the forest edge compared with the forest interior[6,7] This is thought to be responsible for an estimated 600 Mg of carbon loss in the Amazon alone, and if extrapolated to the entire tropics, forest fragmentation could account for up to 24% of global carbon losses due to deforestation[8]. We show that ignoring edge effects can substantially overestimate carbon stored in fragmented forests, with implications for forest policy and management
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