The Contribution of Trees Outside of Forests to Landscape Carbon and Climate Change Mitigation in West Africa
1
Global Observatory for Ecosystem Services, Department of Forestry, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48823, USA
2
Senegalese Institute of Agricultural Research, Saint Louis BP 240, Senegal
3
Future Africa Institute, University of Pretoria, Hatfield 0028, South Africa
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editor: Sparkle Malone
Forests 2021, 12(12), 1652; https://doi.org/10.3390/f12121652
Received: 20 September 2021
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Revised: 20 November 2021
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Accepted: 25 November 2021
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Published: 28 November 2021
(This article belongs to the Section Forest Inventory, Modeling and Remote Sensing)
While closed canopy forests have been an important focal point for land cover change monitoring and climate change mitigation, less consideration has been given to methods for large scale measurements of trees outside of forests. Trees outside of forests are an important but often overlooked natural resource throughout sub-Saharan Africa, providing benefits for livelihoods as well as climate change mitigation and adaptation. In this study, the development of an individual tree cover map using very high-resolution remote sensing and a comparison with a new automated machine learning mapping product revealed an important contribution of trees outside of forests to landscape tree cover and carbon stocks in a region where trees outside of forests are important components of livelihood systems. Here, we test and demonstrate the use of allometric scaling from remote sensing crown area to provide estimates of landscape-scale carbon stocks. Prominent biomass and carbon maps from global-scale remote sensing greatly underestimate the “invisible” carbon in these sparse tree-based systems. The measurement of tree cover and carbon in these landscapes has important application in climate change mitigation and adaptation policies.
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Keywords:
trees outside of forests; REDD+; carbon; climate change; crown allometry; natural climate solutions
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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Skole, D.L.; Samek, J.H.; Dieng, M.; Mbow, C. The Contribution of Trees Outside of Forests to Landscape Carbon and Climate Change Mitigation in West Africa. Forests 2021, 12, 1652. https://doi.org/10.3390/f12121652
AMA Style
Skole DL, Samek JH, Dieng M, Mbow C. The Contribution of Trees Outside of Forests to Landscape Carbon and Climate Change Mitigation in West Africa. Forests. 2021; 12(12):1652. https://doi.org/10.3390/f12121652
Chicago/Turabian StyleSkole, David L., Jay H. Samek, Moussa Dieng, and Cheikh Mbow. 2021. "The Contribution of Trees Outside of Forests to Landscape Carbon and Climate Change Mitigation in West Africa" Forests 12, no. 12: 1652. https://doi.org/10.3390/f12121652
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