Biomass (ecology)

Forest dynamics

Biology

Computer science

Amazon rainforest

Geography

Environmental science

Biochemistry

Physical geography

Old-growth forest

Secondary forest

MEDLINE

Forestry

Climate change

High forest

Forest management

Forest inventory

Forest plot

Deforestation (computer science)

Ecology

Programming language

Agroforestry

Earth system science data

. Forest age can determine the capacity of a forest to uptake carbon from the atmosphere. However, a lack of global diagnostics that reflect the forest stage and associated disturbance regimes hampers the quantification of age-related differences in forest carbon dynamics. This study provides a new global distribution of forest age circa 2010, estimated using a machine learning approach trained with more than 40 000 plots using forest inventory, biomass and climate data. First, an evaluation against the plot-level measurements of forest age reveals that the data-driven method has a relatively good predictive capacity of classifying old-growth vs. non-old-growth (precision = 0.81 and 0.99 for old-growth and non-old-growth, respectively) forests and estimating corresponding forest age estimates (NSE = 0.6 – Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency – and RMSE = 50 years – root-mean-square error). However, there are systematic biases of overestimation in young- and underestimation in old-forest stands, respectively. Globally, w...

Mapping global forest age from forest inventories, biomass and climate data