Abstract
Research Highlights: This study advances the effort to accurately estimate the biomass of trees in peatlands, which cover 13% of Canada’s land surface. Background and Objectives: Trees remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it as biomass. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) has become a useful tool for modelling forest structure and estimating the above ground biomass (AGB) of trees. Allometric equations are often used to estimate individual tree AGB as a function of height and diameter at breast height (DBH), but these variables can often be laborious to measure using traditional methods. The main objective of this study was to develop allometric equations using TLS-measured variables and compare their accuracy with that of other widely used equations that rely on DBH. Materials and Methods: The study focusses on small black spruce trees (<5 m) located in peatland ecosystems of the Taiga Plains Ecozone in the Northwest Territories, Canada. Black spruce growing in peatlands are often stunted when compared to upland black spruce and having models specific to them would allow for more precise biomass estimates. One hundred small trees were destructively sampled from 10 plots and the dry weight of each tree was measured in the lab. With this reference data, we fitted biomass models specific to peatland black spruce using DBH, crown diameter, crown area, height, tree volume, and bounding box volume as predictors. Results: Our best models had crown size and height as predictors and outperformed established AGB equations that rely on DBH. Conclusions: Our equations are based on predictors that can be measured from above, and therefore they may enable the plotless creation of accurate biomass reference data for a prominent tree species in a common ecosystem (treed peatlands) in North America’s boreal.
Highlights
Forests play a major role in the carbon cycle, as they are some of the most important carbon sinks on Earth [1]
Our best Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) models produced estimates of above ground biomass (AGB) for small black spruce that were more accurate than estimates derived from widely used allometric equations first published in Lambert et al [20] and updated in Ung et al [15], which require time-consuming field measurements of diameter at breast height (DBH) and height
Our top model uses as predictors tree height and crown size, but other models performed well with root mean square error (RMSE) ranging from 21% to 73% and adjusted R2 from 0.94 to 0.62
Summary
Forests play a major role in the carbon cycle, as they are some of the most important carbon sinks on Earth [1]. Trees absorb carbon dioxide through the process of photosynthesis [2], removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it as biomass [3]. Carbon has a major effect on the climate system [4], so being able to accurately estimate the amount of carbon being stored in forest ecosystems is necessary for good climate models. The boreal region in Canada (550 million hectares, of which 270 million hectares is forest) [8] is estimated to contain more than 200 billion tons of carbon [9,10]. In Canada, large country-wide efforts have taken place to develop
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