Estimation of above-ground biomass carbon storage in Hulunbeier grassland based on remotely sensed data

Abstract

Grassland biomass carbon storage is one of the most important parts in regulating the carbon cycle and mitigating the global climate change. However, due to the vulnerability and sensibility of grassland in arid and semi-arid regions, grassland degradation and desertification are becoming increasingly serious, and there exist doubt for the carbon source/sink relationship in grassland ecosystem. To estimate the grassland biomass carbon storage is an important task for the research of carbon cycling and rational utilization of grassland resources. In this paper, based on the purpose of providing local scale information for related study and decision making, MODIS-NDVI and meteorological data in plant growing season (April to September) were used for CASA (Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach) Model and Plant Mortality Model to estimate the above-ground biomass carbon storage in Hulunbeier grassland, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China in 2002, 2005, and 2009 respectively. And analyze its spatial and temporal patterns. The results show that the total above-ground biomass carbon storage derived from the above two model were 4.95Tg, 4.53Tg, 4.80Tg (1Tg = 1×1012g) and the average carbon density were 43.41, 39.69, 41.36g/m2 respectively in 2002, 2005 and 2009. The results imply that these two models can provide effective information for the carbon storage estimation and grassland resources management in this research area.