Carbon storage in forest biomass

Kjersti Bakkebø Fjellstad

The Nordic and Baltic countries have ratified the Kyoto Protocol from 1997. The protocol states that the total carbon emissions should be reduced. This may be done both by decreasing the use of fossil fuels and by increasing the accumulation of carbon in terrestrial ecosystems, especially forests.

Carbon storage in the forest

Conscious management of the carbon cycle is therefor necessary, both through preservation of the already stored carbon and by further managing the forest as a sink.

Central questions are:
"What are the amounts of carbon stored in the forest, and how large are the changes in carbon stores under different management options"?

The Nordic and Baltic countries face the same challenge of establishing national methods for estimation of annual removals of carbon by forest sinks. Information on the estimation of carbon sequestration in stand biomass is available in the Nordic and Baltic countries, but in a fragmented and incompatible form, state-of-the-art varying between the countries.

Objectives
·To give an overview of how data on biomass distribution from national forest inventories and other easily accessible sources are used and potentially can be used in the national Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) reporting in the Nordic and Baltic countries.
·To synthesise available knowledge on expansion factors and functions.
·To develop a PC-tool for estimation of carbon stand biomass in Norway spruce.
·To use the developed tool to identify, quantify, and illustrate the major errors and uncertainties in biomass carbon budgets.

Project leader
Senior scientist Karin Hansen, Forest & Landscape, Denmark

Project coordinator at UMB
Associate professor Jon Frank, INA

Project collaboration
Forest & Landscape, Denmark
Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB), Norway
Norwegian Forest Research Institute (Skogforsk), Norway
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Sweden
Forestry Research Institute of Sweden (Skogforsk), Sweden
Finnish Forest Research Institute (METLA), Finland
Icelandic Forest Service (MÓGILSÁ), Iceland
Forest Research Institute, Estonian Agricultural University, Estonia
Latvian Forestry Research Institute (SILAVA), Latvia
Lithuanian Forest Research Institute (LFRI), Lithuania


Updated: 01.04.05
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