EGU21-11217
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-11217
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

New estimate of growing stock volume and carbon sequestration of Russian forests based on national forest inventory and remote sensing data

Dmitry Schepaschenko1,2, Elena Moltchanova3, Stanislav Fedorov4, Victor Karminov2, Petr Ontikov4, Maurizio Santoro5, Linda See1, Vladimir Kositsyn6, Anatoly Shvidenko1, Anna Romanovskaya7, Vladimir Korotkov7, Sergey Bartalev8, Steffen Fritz1, Maria Shchepashchenko9, and Florian Kraxner1
Dmitry Schepaschenko et al.
  • 1International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria (schepd@iiasa.ac.at)
  • 2Center for Forest Ecology and Productivity of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia (vnk57@yandex.ru)
  • 3School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand (elena.moltchanova@canterbury.ac.nz)
  • 4FSBI Roslesinforg, Federal Forestry Agency, Moscow, Russia (fedorov.sv@roslesinforg.ru)
  • 5Gamma Remote Sensing, Gümligen, Switzerland (santoro@gamma-rs.ch)
  • 6Federal Forestry Agency, Moscow, Russia (lesoustr@rosleshoz.ru)
  • 7Yu. A. Izrael Institute of Global Climate and Ecology, Moscow, Russia (an_roman@mail.ru)
  • 8Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia (bartalev@d902.iki.rssi.ru)
  • 9Russian Institute of Continuous Education in Forestry, Pushkino, Russia (mariaschep@gmail.com)

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and transition to a new forest inventory system, Russia has reported (FAO, 2014) almost no changes in growing stock (+1.8%) and biomass (+0.6%). Yet remote sensing products indicate increased vegetation productivity (Guay et al., 2014), tree cover (Song et al., 2018) and above-ground biomass (Liu et al., 2015). Here, we challenge the official national statistics with a combination of recent National Forest Inventory and remote sensing data products to provide an alternative estimate of the growing stock of Russian forests and assess the relative changes in the post-Soviet era. Our estimate for the year 2014 is 118.29±1.3 109 m3, which is 48% higher than the official value reported for the same year in the State Forest Register. The difference is explained by increased biomass density in forested areas (+39%) and larger forest area estimates (+9%). Using the last Soviet Union report (1988) as a reference, Russian forests have accumulated 1163×106 m3 yr-1 of growing stock between 1988–2014, which compensates for forest growing stock losses in tropical countries (FAO FRA, 2015). Our estimate of the growing stock of managed forests is 94.2 109 m3, which corresponds to sequestration of 354 Tg C yr-1 in live biomass over 1988–2014, or 47% higher than reported in the National Greenhouse Gases Inventory (National Inventory Report, 2020).

Acknowledgement: The research plots data collection was performed within the framework of the state assignment of the Center for Forest Ecology and Productivity of the Russian Academy of Sciences (no. АААА-А18-118052590019-7), and the ground data pre-processing were financially supported by the Russian Science Foundation (project no. 19-77-30015).

How to cite: Schepaschenko, D., Moltchanova, E., Fedorov, S., Karminov, V., Ontikov, P., Santoro, M., See, L., Kositsyn, V., Shvidenko, A., Romanovskaya, A., Korotkov, V., Bartalev, S., Fritz, S., Shchepashchenko, M., and Kraxner, F.: New estimate of growing stock volume and carbon sequestration of Russian forests based on national forest inventory and remote sensing data, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-11217, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-11217, 2021.

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