57
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
1 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Degradation in carbon stocks near tropical forest edges

      research-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          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.

          Abstract

          Forest fragmentation is thought to reduce carbon storage at forest edges. Here, using remote sensing datasets, the authors show that biomass is 25% lower within 500 m of the forest edge, and suggest that fragmentation results in a global reduction in tropical forest carbon stocks by nearly 10%.

          Related collections

          Most cited references8

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          Land use. Cracking Brazil's Forest Code.

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: found

            Increasing human dominance of tropical forests

            Tropical forests house over half of Earth’s biodiversity and are an important influence on the climate system. These forests are experiencing escalating human influence, altering their health and the provision of important ecosystem functions and services. Impacts started with hunting and millennia-old megafaunal extinctions (phase I), continuing via low-intensity shifting cultivation (phase II), to today’s global integration, dominated by intensive permanent agriculture, industrial logging, and attendant fires and fragmentation (phase III). Such ongoing pressures, together with an intensification of global environmental change, may severely degrade forests in the future (phase IV, global simplification) unless new “development without destruction” pathways are established alongside climate change–resilient landscape designs.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Article: not found

              Environment and development. Brazil's Soy Moratorium.

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                Nat Commun
                Nat Commun
                Nature Communications
                Nature Publishing Group
                2041-1723
                18 December 2015
                2015
                : 6
                : 10158
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Natural Capital Project, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University , 371 Serra Mall, Stanford, California 94305, USA
                [2 ]Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics, St Lawrence University , 23 Romoda Drive, Canton, New York 13617, USA
                [3 ]Department of Applied Ecology, David Clark Labs, North Carolina State University , 100 Brooks Avenue, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695-7617, USA
                [4 ]Institute on the Environment (IonE), University of Minnesota , 1954 Buford Avenue, St Paul, Minnesota 55108, USA
                [5 ]Woods Hole Research Center , 149 Woods Hole Road, Falmouth, Massachusetts 02540, USA
                [6 ]Safety and Environmental Assurance Centre, Unilever R&D , Colworth Science Park, Sharnbrook, Bedfordshire MK44 1LQ, UK
                Author notes
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9024-1657
                Article
                ncomms10158
                10.1038/ncomms10158
                4703854
                26679749
                f9259bbd-cd5e-4046-a287-e69e1644a41c
                Copyright © 2015, Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All Rights Reserved.

                This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

                History
                : 21 July 2015
                : 08 November 2015
                Categories
                Article

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

                Comments

                Comment on this article