Monitoring Forest Degradation for Carbon Accounting

Dear Colleagues,

Forests are suppliers of multiple ecosystem goods and services, of which carbon storage is one of the best known in relation to global climate regulation. However, provision of these services is threatened by degradation processes, which are causing major carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Reducing both deforestation and forest degradation is therefore particularly important within international strategies for reducing emissions. Methods of monitoring carbon emissions due to deforestation are based on identifying changes in land cover by different types of forest over time and characterization of the emission factors for each type of cover. This procedure has been accepted by the scientific community because it is transparent and verifiable, although it can be methodologically demanding in some types of forest. However, quantification of carbon emissions due to forest degradation is more difficult, owing to the lack of operational definitions and quantifiable indicators of forest degradation, as well as thresholds for degraded and non-degraded forests and standard procedures for differentiating forest degradation from sustainable forest management. This results in a lack of uniformity in reporting forest degradation at the international level, thus complicating the wider extrapolation of estimated carbon emissions due to forest degradation and negatively affecting the transparency and verifiability of the assessments. This special issue aims to report up-to-date knowledge of monitoring forest degradation for carbon accounting purposes. Authors should focus their reports on methodological aspects such as, for example, observational designs for quantifying the extent of forest degradation at stand level, sampling techniques for producing estimates and uncertainty analysis. The development of quantifiable indicators of forest degradation is also of key importance in this special issue, along with the definition of operational thresholds for degraded and non-degraded forests. Authors should relate their assessments to specific degradation processes.

Dr. César Pérez-Cruzado
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• REDD+
• Forest inventory
• Remote sensing
• Sampling statistics
• National Greenhouse Gas Inventories
• Disturbances
• Forest carbon pools