Clearing

Ecology

Programming language

Carbon sequestration

Tropics

Agroforestry

Archaeology

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation

Greenhouse gas

Computer science

Carbon dioxide

Geography

Carbon stock

Climate change mitigation

Finance

Land use, land-use change and forestry

Climate change

Biology

Environmental science

Agriculture

Land use

Forestry

Economics

Deforestation (computer science)

Environmental Research Letters

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and enhancing carbon stocks (REDD+) is a crucial component of global climate change mitigation. Remote sensing can provide continuous and spatially explicit above-ground biomass (AGB) estimates, which can be valuable for the quantification of carbon stocks and emission factors (EFs). Unfortunately, there is little information on the fate of the land following tropical deforestation and of the associated carbon stock. This study quantified post-deforestation land use across the tropics for the period 1990–2000. This dataset was then combined with a pan-tropical AGB map at 30 m resolution to refine EFs from forest conversion by matching deforestation areas with their carbon stock before and after clearing and to assess spatial dynamics of EFs by follow-up land use. In Latin America, pasture was the most common follow-up land use (72%), with large-scale cropland (11%) a distant second. In Africa deforestation was often followed by small-scale cropping...

Tropical deforestation drivers and associated carbon emission factors derived from remote sensing data