New System Helps Measure Accurate Biomass of California

The GLAS method allows scientist to accurately measure the biomass of California through the data collected by the ICESat2.

The biggest natural sink of terrestrial carbon lies in our forests and trees. Forests are the world's largest banks for all the carbon emitted into atmosphere through natural process and human activities. Human activities release up to nine billion tons of carbon each year by burning fossil fuel.

Biomass removals have become a key part of forestry across the country. Biomass plays a critical role in alleviating the disastrous effects of global climate change.  There are a number of technological options available to make use of a wide variety of biomass types as a renewable energy source.

Researchers working on the data collected by the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System(GLAS) aboard the Ice Cloud and Elevation Satellite (ICESat) have found a way to accurately measure the biomass of California. According to the reports, when ICESat2 will be launched in 2016, this method will be able to examine biomass and other global data changes.

It is believed that under the global carbon cycle, the global biomass acts as a carbon reservoir and deforestation and changes of land use contribute to global warming by liberating carbon from this reservoir.

An attempt to measure changes in forest carbon storage has been undertaken by the United Nations Collaborative Programmed on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD).

With the help of the new technique, researchers from the US Forest Service, NASA and Colorado State University, have been able to develop a randomization procedure which allows accurate estimates of total biomass.

Dr Sean Healey from the Rocky Mountain Research Station explained, "To sample the Lidar data we split the area to be evaluated up into a series of equal area, but not equal shape units, using a fractal-based approach. This provided us with a statistically solid base to our estimates. Each unit contained at least one GLAS shot and where there was more than one shot (on average each unit had 560 shots) only one was randomly chosen. We tested this method on California because the US Forest Inventory and Analysis program (FIA) maintains extensive forestry records including biomass which we could compare our method to."

They noticed the GLAS estimate of biomass for California was 211 Mg/ha -- equivalent to the FIA estimate.

Dr Sean Healey continued, "In fact, this method has been adopted for just this purpose by a partnership between scientists participating in the NASA Carbon Monitoring System pilot project and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)." Co-editor-in-chief of Carbon Balance and Management, Dr Burke Hales said, "The GLAS approach shows promise in standardizing global forest biomass inventory, and in improving spatial and temporal coverage more quickly, easily, and most likely cheaply than traditional methods. We will probably need to rely on 'boots on the ground' estimates to refine the GLAS method for some time, but the addition of this approach will reduce the uncertainty currently overshadowing the inclusion of forest biomass in global carbon budgets."

New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal, Carbon Balance and Management