Degradation in carbon stocks near tropical forest edges
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Forest degradation has critical magnitude in the Brazilian Amazon.
“because of its critical magnitude in the Brazilian Amazon (Souza et al., 2013, Aragão and Shimabukuro, 2010, Chaplin-Kramer et al., 2015and Bustamante et al., 2016).”
From Transition in environmental governance in the Brazilian Amazon: emergence of a new pattern of socio-economic development and deforestation (2016) · cites this paper as Chaplin-Kramer et al., 2015
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Cites
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“Forest edge distances are calculated by first masking all global land cover MODIS layers that correspond to forest land cover IDs, (specifically, evergreen needleleaf forest (1), evergreen broadleaf forest (2), deciduous needleleaf forest (3), deciduous broadleaf forest (4) and mixed forest (5)).”
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Tropical forests are a net carbon source based on aboveground measurements of gain and loss
Baccini, A., Walker, W., Carvalho, L., Farina, M., Sulla-Menashe, D., & Houghton, R. A. (2017) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.aam5962 · Cited by 904 · see citing works
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- Authors
- Chaplin-Kramer, R., Ramler, I., Sharp, R., Haddad, N. M., Gerber, J. S., West, P. C., Mandle, L., Engstrom, P., Baccini, A., Sim, S., Mueller, C., & King, H.
- Affiliations
- St. Lawrence University (US)
- Stanford University (US)
- North Carolina State University (US)
- University of Minnesota (US)
- Woodwell Climate Research Center (US)
- Unilever (United Kingdom) (GB)
- ORCID
- Venue
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2015-12-18
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 10158-10158
- ISSN
- 2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4703854
- OpenAlex
- W2215152799
- Cited by
- 238
- References
- 6
- Citations by year
- 2026: 25 · 2025: 23 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 25 · 2022: 21 · 2021: 23 · 2020: 26 · 2019: 22 · 2018: 20 · 2017: 17 · 2016: 15 · 2015: 1
- FWCI
- 16.54
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Nature Communications (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (NE/M021327/1)
- Belmont Forum
- Natural Environment Research Council (NE/M021327/1)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Nature and Landscape Conservation › Forest ecology and management
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Environmental Engineering › Remote Sensing and LiDAR Applications
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management
- Keywords
- carbon stocks, tropical forests, forest fragmentation, aboveground biomass, land cover, landscape management, carbon sequestration
- MeSH terms
- Brazil, Carbon, Conservation of Natural Resources, Tropical Climate, Biomass, Climate Change, Forests
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