Climate change negotiations aim to reduce net greenhouse-gas emissions by encouraging direct reductions of emissions and crediting countries for their terrestrial greenhouse-gas sinks. Ecosystem carbon dioxide uptake has offset nearly 10% of Europe's fossil fuel emissions, but not all of this may be creditable under the rules of the Kyoto Protocol. Although this treaty recognizes the importance of methane and nitrous oxide emissions, scientific research has largely focused on carbon dioxide. Here we review recent estimates of European carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide fluxes between 2000 and 2005, using both top-down estimates based on atmospheric observations and bottom-up estimates derived from ground-based measurements. Both methods yield similar fluxes of greenhouse gases, suggesting that methane emissions from feedstock and nitrous oxide emissions from arable agriculture are fully compensated for by the carbon dioxide sink provided by forests and grasslands. As a result, the balance for all greenhouse gases across Europe's terrestrial biosphere is near neutral, despite carbon sequestration in forests and grasslands. The trend towards more intensive agriculture and logging is likely to make Europe's land surface a significant source of greenhouse gases. The development of land management policies which aim to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions should be a priority.

Importance of methane and nitrous oxide for Europe's terrestrial greenhouse-gas balance

We present a new synthesis, based on a suite of complementary approaches, of the primary production and carbon sink in forests of the 25 member states of the European Union (EU-25) during 1990-2005. Upscaled terrestrial observations and model-based approaches agree within 25% on the mean net primary production (NPP) of forests, i.e. 520 +/- 75 g C m-2 yr-1 over a forest area of 1.32 x 106 km2 to 1.55 x 106 km2 (EU-25). New estimates of the mean long-term carbon forest sink (net biome production, NBP) of EU-25 forests amounts 75 +/- 20 g C m-2 yr-1. The ratio of NBP to NPP is 0.15 +/- 0.05. Estimates of the fate of the carbon inputs via NPP in wood harvests, forest fires, losses to lakes and rivers and heterotrophic respiration remain uncertain, which explains the considerable uncertainty of NBP. Inventory-based assessments and assumptions suggest that 29 +/- 15% of the NBP (i.e., 22 g C m-2 yr-1) is sequestered in the forest soil, but large uncertainty remains concerning the drivers and future of the soil organic carbon. The remaining 71 +/- 15% of the NBP (i.e., 53 g C m-2 yr-1) is realized as woody biomass increments. In the EU-25, the relatively large forest NBP is thought to be the result of a sustained difference between NPP, which increased during the past decades, and carbon losses primarily by harvest and heterotrophic respiration, which increased less over the same period.

The European carbon balance. Part 3: forests

https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/jrnl/2011/nrs_2011_damato_002.pdf

Forest management for mitigation and adaptation to climate change: Insights from long-term silviculture experiments

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Increased soil organic carbon stocks under agroforestry: A survey of six different sites in France

Wood products are considered to contribute to the mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions. A critical gap in the life cycle of wood products is to transfer the raw timber from the forest to the processing wood industry and, thus, the primary wood products. Therefore, often rough estimates are used for this step to obtain total forestry carbon balances. The objectives of this study were (1) to examine the fate of timber harvested in Thuringian state forests (central Germany), representing a large, intensively managed forested region, and (2) to quantify carbon stocks and the lifetime of primary wood products made from this timber. The analyses were based on the amount and assortments of actually sold timber, and production parameters of the companies that bought and processed this timber. In addition, for coniferous stands of a selected Thuringian forest district, we calculated potential effects of management, as expressed by different thinning regimes on wood products and their lifetimes. Total annual timber sale of soft- and hardwoods from Thuringian state forests (195,000 ha) increased from about 136,893 t C (~0.7 t C ha−1 year−1) in 1996 to 280,194 t C (~1.4 t C ha−1 year−1) in 2005. About 47% of annual total timber harvest went into short-lived wood products with a mean residence time (MRT) < 25 years. Thirty-one per cent of the total harvest went into wood products with an MRT of 25–43 years, and only 22% was used as construction wood and glued wood, products with the longest MRT (50 years). The average MRT of carbon in harvested wood products was 20 years. Thinning from above throughout the rotation of spruce forests would lead to an average MRT in harvested wood products of about 23 years, thinning from below of about 18 years. A comparison of our calculations with estimates that resulted from the products module of the CO2FIX model (Nabuurs et al. 2001) demonstrates the influence of regional differences in forest management and wood processing industry on the lifetime of harvested wood products. To our knowledge, the present study provides for the first time real carbon inputs of a defined forest management unit to the wood product sector by linking data on raw timber production, timber sales and wood processing. With this new approach and using this data, it should be possible to substantially improve the net-carbon balance of the entire forestry sector.

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Forest management and carbon sequestration in wood products

For carbon (C) trading or any other verifiable C reports, it would be reasonable to identify and quantify continuous changes in carbon stocks at regional scales without high investments into additional C-specific, timeand labor-intensive inventories. Our study demonstrates the potential of using routine stand taxation data from large scale forestry inventories for verifiable quantification of tree biomass C stocks, C stock change rates, and associated uncertainties. Empirical models, parameters, and equations of uncertainty propagation have been assembled and applied to data from a forest management unit in Central Germany (550 000 ha), using stand taxation inventories collected between 1993 and 2006. The study showed: 1) The use of stand taxation data resulted in a verifiable and sufficiently precise (cv = 7%) quantification of tree biomass carbon stocks and their changes at the level of growth-regions (1700 to 140 000 ha). 2) The forest of the test region accumulated carbon in tree biomass at a mean annual rate of 1.8 (–0.9 to 4.5) tC/ha/yr over the studied period. 3) The taxation inventory data can reveal spatial patterns of rates of C stock changes, specifically low rates of 0.4 tC/ha/yr in the northwest and high rates of 3.0 tC/ha/yr in the south of the study region.

Ingolf Profft

Papers

Forest management and carbon sequestration in wood products

Quantifying tree biomass carbon stocks, their changes and uncertainties using routine stand taxation inventory data

Vorbereitungen für eine laufende Fortschreibung der Kohlenstoffvorräte in den Wäldern Thüringens

Forstwirtschaft und Naturschutz - Eine Betrachtung der gegensätzlichen Positionen