Estimating the carbon benefits of agroforestry lands in Africa

Agroforestry is considered as a land-use practice that sequesters carbon or reduces emissions without compromising food production or biodiversity. However, current research relies on field site observations or coarse tree canopy cover maps, resulting in biases in estimating the carbon benefits from agroforestry on a large scale. Here, we produced an agroforestry map at 100 m resolution for 2019, using high-resolution tree canopy cover data, accounting for spatial arrangements of tree interactions within the agroforestry land. We mapped the agroforestry lands with scattered and linear trees on cropland and validated the mapping results against the ground-based sites collected from literature and Google Earth maps. The overall accuracy and precision of the agroforestry map are 79.96% and 70.08%, respectively. By combining our agroforestry map and cropland extent data, we found that agroforestry provides a carbon benefit of 0.8 ± 0.1 Mg C ha-1 compared to near-monocultures, with African agroforestry stored an additional 59.38 Tg C across 71.14 million hectares.