Annual Report 2005 - Forest-based entrepreneurship and forest environment models and databanks

There are two essential challenges in forest carbon inventories. Firstly, the inter-annual changes in carbon amounts are small compared to the existing carbon stocks. Secondly, there is strong inter-annual variation within forest ecosystems but only a limited amount of data on this is available.

Information gained from national forest inventories regarding average tree reserves, growth and removals can be used to estimate forest carbon sinks. However, assessing these changes involves some uncertainty. The annually updated tree growth estimates reduce the uncertainty regarding carbon sinks.

Assessing soil carbon stocks is generally considered very challenging. The currently available assessment methods are based on modelling, since the present forest inventories do not include monitoring of soil carbon stocks. The reliability of the annual sink assessments is discredited by, for example, ambiguous data about the original soil carbon amount. To calculate an estimate of soil carbon stocks, data about litter input is needed; this can be calculated on the basis of biomass stocks and removals. Hence, also the annual input of litterfall affects the uncertainty of soil carbon sink. Additionally, uncertainty is also caused by modelling the decomposition of litterfall and how much the decomposition rate depends on temperature.

Additional information: www.metla.fi/hanke/3306/index-en.htm

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Updated:	13.09.2006 / SKon	Metla : Annual Report : Annual Report 2005

Accuracy must be improved in assessments of greenhouse gas emissions