A. Baccini

• Professor at Boston University

Working paper analysing the economic implications of the proposed 30% target for areal protection in the draft post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework

Aboveground biomass (AGB) is an essential variable in the study of the carbon cycle, and remote sensing provides the only viable means for mapping and monitoring biomass at large scales in time and space. Still, inconsistencies in biomass estimates are large which necessitates methods to achieve consistent mapping of biomass over time and space. In...

Significance Despite increased interest in land-based carbon storage as a climate solution, there are physical limits on how much additional carbon can be incorporated into terrestrial ecosystems. To effectively determine where and how to act, jurisdictions need robust data illustrating the magnitude and distribution of opportunities to increase ca...

Reforestation is an important strategy for nature-based climate solutions and identifying carbon storage potential of different locations is critical to its success. Applying average carbon values from forest inventories ignores the spatial heterogeneity in forest carbon and the effects of forest edges on carbon storage degradation. Here we show ho...

Carbon losses from forest degradation and disturbances are significant and growing sources of emissions in the Brazilian Amazon. Between 2003 and 2019, degradation and disturbance accounted for 44% of forest carbon losses in the region, compared with 56% from deforestation (forest clearing). We found that land tenure played a decisive role in expla...

Climate change is altering vegetation and disturbance dynamics in boreal ecosystems. However, the aggregate impact of these changes on boreal carbon budgets is not well understood. Here we combined multiple satellite datasets to estimate annual stocks and changes in aboveground biomass (AGB) across boreal northwestern North America. From 1984 to 20...

Managing forests for climate change mitigation requires action by diverse stakeholders undertaking different activities with overlapping objectives and spatial impacts. To date, several forest carbon monitoring systems have been developed for different regions using various data, methods and assumptions, making it difficult to evaluate mitigation p...

Resolving regional carbon budgets is critical for informing land-based mitigation policy. For nine regions covering nearly the whole globe, we collected inventory estimates of carbon-stock changes complemented by satellite estimates of biomass changes where inventory data are missing. The net land–atmospheric carbon exchange (NEE) was calculated by...

While improved management of agricultural landscapes is promoted as a promising natural climate solution, available estimates of the mitigation potential are based on coarse assessments of both agricultural extent and aboveground carbon density. Here we combine 30 meter resolution global maps of aboveground woody carbon, tree cover, and cropland ex...

This work is focused on characterizing and understanding the aboveground biomass of Caatinga in a semiarid region in northeastern Brazil. The quantification of Caatinga biomass is limited by the small number of field plots, which are inadequate for addressing the biome’s extreme heterogeneity. Satellite-derived biomass products can address spatial...

Seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTFs) account for one-third of the interannual variability of global net primary productive (NPP). Large-scale shifts in dry tropical forest structure may thus significantly affect global CO2 fluxes in ways that are not fully accounted for in current projections. This study quantifies how changing climate might res...

Severe drought and extreme heat associated with the 2015–2016 El Niño event have led to large carbon emissions from the tropical vegetation to the atmosphere. With the return to normal climatic conditions in 2017, tropical forest aboveground carbon (AGC) stocks are expected to partly recover due to increased productivity, but the intensity and spat...

Maintaining the abundance of carbon stored aboveground in Amazon forests is central to any comprehensive climate stabilization strategy. Growing evidence points to indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) as buffers against large-scale carbon emissions across a nine-nation network of indigenous territories (ITs) and protected natural areas...

Meeting climate mitigation and sustainable development goals requires rapid increases in both renewable energy development and carbon storage in ecosystems. If sited with the sole goal of maximizing production, renewable energy may negatively impact biodiversity and carbon storage. Here, we evaluated the potential unintended environmental consequen...

Over 140 Mha of restoration commitments have been pledged across the global tropics, yet guidance is needed to identify those landscapes where implementation is likely to provide the greatest potential benefits and cost-effective outcomes. By overlaying seven recent, peer-reviewed spatial datasets as proxies for socioenviron-mental benefits and fea...

Over 140 Mha of restoration commitments have been pledged across the global tropics, yet guidance is needed to identify those landscapes where implementation is likely to provide the greatest potential benefits and cost-effective outcomes. By overlaying seven recent, peer-reviewed spatial datasets as proxies for socioenviron-mental benefits and fea...

The Hansen et al . critique centers on the lack of spatial agreement between two very different datasets. Nonetheless, properly constructed comparisons designed to reconcile the two datasets yield up to 90% agreement (e.g., in South America).

The apparent accumulation of carbon on land necessary to balance the global carbon budget (previously referred to as the missing carbon sink and more recently labeled the residual terrestrial sink) has perplexed scientists since the first carbon budgets were constructed (Keeling 1973). The magnitude of the sink over the decade 2006‐2015 averaged 3....

The temperate forests in the Black Sea region contain some of the last remaining intact forests between southern Europe and West Asia . The collapse of the Soviet Union brought great political and institutional changes to the region that have already impacted these forests, which have experienced long land use and management histories. In this chap...

Forests out of balance Are tropical forests a net source or net sink of atmospheric carbon dioxide? As fundamental a question as that is, there still is no agreement about the answer, with different studies suggesting that it is anything from a sizable sink to a modest source. Baccini et al. used 12 years of MODIS satellite data to determine how th...

Mapping and monitoring of forest carbon stocks across large areas in the tropics will necessarily rely on remote sensing approaches, which in turn depend on field estimates of biomass for calibration and validation purposes. Here, we used field plot data collected in a tropical moist forest in the central Amazon to gain a better understanding of th...

Deforestation rates have declined in the Brazilian Amazon since 2005, yet degradation from logging, fire, and fragmentation has continued in frontier forests. In this study we quantified the aboveground carbon density (ACD) in intact and degraded forests using the largest data set of integrated forest inventory plots (n = 359) and airborne lidar da...

Appendix S1. Supplemental analysis, methodological detail, and data. Figure S1. Benchmark gross deforestation rates for (a) all countries within the pantropical study area; (b) Brazil; (c) Indonesia primary forests; (d) all tropical signatories of the New York Declaration on Forests; and (e) remaining tropical forested countries that did not sign...

More than 600,000 km 2 of tropical forests have been cleared in this century alone. The Earth's future climate and the well-being of its people will depend on how much of the remaining forest receives permanent protection. Tropical forests store 230 billion tons of carbon. Each year they absorb over 1 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere, mor...

Background: Forest conservation efforts are increasingly being implemented at the scale of sub-national jurisdictions in order to mitigate global climate change and provide other ecosystem services. We see an urgent need for robust estimates of historic forest carbon emissions at this scale, as the basis for credible measures of climate and other...

Complete carbon flux equation. (DOCX)

Legal logging activity methods, and illegal logging emissions methods and results. (DOCX)

Biomass benchmark map methods, results, and comparison with alternatives. (DOCX)

R-code for Monte Carlo simulation. (DOCX)

Methods and results for accuracy assessment of Hansen forest loss product. (DOCX)

Significance Understanding how changes in climate will affect terrestrial ecosystems is particularly important in tropical forest regions, which store large amounts of carbon and exert important feedbacks onto regional and global climates. By combining multiple types of observations with a state-of-the-art terrestrial ecosystem model, we demonstrat...

Supplementary Figures 1-3 and Supplementary Tables 1-2

Carbon stock estimates based on land cover type are critical for informing climate change assessment and landscape management, but field and theoretical evidence indicates that forest fragmentation reduces the amount of carbon stored at forest edges. Here, using remotely sensed pantropical biomass and land cover data sets, we estimate that biomass...

Halving carbon emissions from tropical deforestation by 2020 could help bring the international community closer to the agreed goal of <2 degree increase in global average temperature change and is consistent with a target set last year by the governments, corporations, indigenous peoples organizations and non-governmental organizations that signed...

Tropical forests provide global climate regulation ecosystem services and their clearing is a significant source of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and resultant radiative forcing of climate change. However, consensus on pan-tropical forest carbon dynamics is lacking. We present a new estimate that employs recommended good practices to...

Significance Our paper is significant in a number of respects. First, we expand the literature on quasi-experimental evaluation of the causal impact of conservation measures to include agricultural concessions. Second, our report is rare in that we use panel data and techniques in a literature on spatially explicit land-use change econometrics that...

Carbon sequestration is a widely acknowledged and increasingly valued function of tropical forest ecosystems; however, until recently, the information needed to assess the carbon storage capacity of Amazonian indigenous territories (ITs) and protected natural areas (PNAs) in a global context remained either lacking or out of reach. Here, as part of...

In a recent paper (Mitchard et al. 2014, Global Ecology and Biogeography, 23, 935–946) a new map of forest biomass based on a geostatistical model of field data for the Amazon (and surrounding forests) was presented and contrasted with two earlier maps based on remote-sensing data Saatchi et al. (2011; RS1) and Baccini et al. (2012; RS2). Mitchard...

Commodity crop expansion in the tropics presents the challenge of preserving tropical moist forest (TMF) ecosystems and their role in carbon sequestration. We propose an algorithm, specific to the TMF biome, which identifies 125 Million ha of degraded, low-carbon density land (LCDL) in the Pantropical TMF belt for agricultural expansion. About 65 M...

Timeline of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites, carrying the AVHRR sensors used in the GIMMS record. Figure S2. Spectral response curves for the red and near-infrared (NIR) bands of the AVHRR, MODIS, SeaWiFS, and SPOT VGT sensors. Figure S3. A map of lag-1 autocorrelation for the GIMMS3g GS-NDVI time series. Figur...

Satellite-derived indices of photosynthetic activity are the primary data source used to study changes in global vegetation productivity over recent decades. Creating coherent, long-term records of vegetation activity from legacy satellite data sets requires addressing many factors that introduce uncertainties into vegetation index time series. We...

Emissions of carbon from tropical deforestation and degradation currently account for 12-15% of total anthropogenic carbon emissions each year, and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD; including REDD+) is poised to be the primary international mechanism with the potential to reduce these emissions. This article provid...

Background: Countries interested in monitoring and quantifying the carbon stock of their tropical forests need cost-effective methodologies to map aboveground carbon density (ACD) at regional and national project levels, and with measurable precision and accuracy. This study reports on improvements made possible by the use of airborne high resoluti...

Recent advances in remote sensing enable the mapping and monitoring of carbon stocks without relying on extensive in situ measurements. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is among the countries where national forest inventories (NFI) are either non-existent or out of date. Here we demonstrate a method for estimating national-scale gross for...

Mapping the aboveground biomass of tropical forests is essential both for implementing conservation policy and reducing uncertainties in the global carbon cycle. Two medium resolution (500m -- 1000m) pantropical maps of vegetation biomass have been recently published, and have been widely used by sub-national and national-level activities in relati...

The geographic distribution of Bornean orang-utans and its overlap with existing land-use categories (protected areas, logging and plantation concessions) is a necessary foundation to prioritize conservation planning. Based on an extensive orang-utan survey dataset and a number of environmental variables, we modelled an orang-utan distribution map....

As reported by FAO (2005 State of the World’s Forests (Rome: UNFAO), 2010 Forest Resource Assessment (FRA) 2010/095 (Rome: UNFAO)), Indonesia experiences the second highest rate of deforestation among tropical countries. Hence, timely and accurate forest data are required to combat deforestation and forest degradation in support of climate change...

Terrestrial biomass is considered as an essential indicator for the monitoring of the Earth’s ecosystem and climate. In recent years, many regional biomass datasets have been produced. These were obtained using a wide range of methods: from pure remote sensing RS to the collection of field measurements. The Biomass Geo-Wiki is a new tool from the f...

Aboveground woody biomass for circa-2000 is mapped at national scale in Uganda at 30-m spatial resolution on the basis of Landsat ETM+images, a National land cover dataset and field data using an object-oriented approach. A regression tree-based model (Random Forest) produces good results (cross-validated R² 0.81, RMSE 13T/ha) when trained with a s...

Deforestation contributes 6-17% of global anthropogenic CO2 emissions to the atmosphere. Large uncertainties in emission estimates arise from inadequate data on the carbon density of forests and the regional rates of deforestation. Consequently there is an urgent need for improved data sets that characterize the global distribution of aboveground b...

Large-scale climate patterns influenced temperature and weather patterns around the globe in 2011. In particular, a moderate-to-strong La Nina at the beginning of the year dissipated during boreal spring but reemerged during fall. The phenomenon contributed to historical droughts in East Africa, the southern United States, and northern Mexico, as w...

Satellite and aircraft-based remote sensing observations are being more frequently used to generate spatially explicit estimates of aboveground carbon stock of forest ecosystems. Because deforestation and forest degradation account for circa 10% of anthropogenic carbon emissions to the atmosphere, policy mechanisms are increasingly recognized as a...

The availability of several national remote sensing datasets with 30 m resolution for ca. year 2000, i.e. the SRTM DEM, the USGS National Elevation Dataset (NED), the National Land Cover Dataset 2001 (NLCD 2001) as well as Landsat ETM+ data compiled by the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium (MRLC), represented a unique opportunity to...

In the frame of a Pantropical mapping project, we aim at producing high-resolution forest cover maps from ALOS PALSAR. The ALOS data was obtained through the Americas ALOS Data Node (AADN) at ASF. For the forest cover classification, a pan-tropical network of calibrated reference data was generated from ancillary satellite data (ICESAT GLAS). These...

Data from spaceborne light detection and ranging (lidar) opens the possibility to map forest vertical structure globally. We present a wall-to-wall, global map of canopy height at 1-km spatial resolution, using 2005 data from the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) aboard ICESat (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite). A challenge in the us...

The collapse of socialism in 1989 triggered a phase of institutional restructuring in Central and Eastern Europe. Several countries chose to privatize forests or to return them to pre-socialist owners. Here, we assess the implications of forest restitution on the terrestrial carbon balance. New forest owners have strong incentives to immediately cl...

Biomass mapping using satellite imagery is a rapidly evolving field that has been greatly facilitated in recent years by the advent of LiDAR remote sensing coupled with co-located field measurements. The biomass map of Africa that we published in 2008 did not take direct advantage of coincident field and LiDAR measurements, as our more recent effor...

Forests store the vast majority of terrestrial carbon, but variability in space and time is substantial. Accurate and repeatable estimates of aboveground carbon stored in tropical vegetation are important for compensation mechanism for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). Remotely sensed data have been used extensively to e...

1. INTRODUCTION Forest carbon monitoring is a crucial component for the scientific understanding of the terrestrial carbon cycle as well as the success of crediting developing countries for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. Now, tropical and subtropical nations are challenged to establish Monitoring, Repor...

In this paper we investigate the use of space-borne sensors to estimate the height and aboveground biomass of tropical forests. The specific goals of this work were to assess the accuracy of LiDAR-derived vegetation height and biomass and analyze methods to combine LiDAR-derived biomass values with satellite images to generate spatially explicit es...

An international policy mechanism is under negotiation for compensating tropical nations that succeed in lowering their greenhouse gas emissions from tropical deforestation and forest degradation, responsible for approximately one-fifth of worldwide carbon emissions. One of the barriers to its success is the adoption of a unique MRV system and the...

Globally, the loss of forests now contributes almost 20% of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere. There is an immediate need to reduce the current rates of forest loss, and the associated release of carbon dioxide, but for many areas of the world these rates are largely unknown. The Soviet Union contained a substantial part of the world's for...

Drought exerts a strong influence on tropical forest metabolism, carbon stocks, and ultimately the flux of carbon to the atmosphere. Satellite-based studies have suggested that Amazon forests green up during droughts because of increased sunlight, whereas field studies have reported increased tree mortality during severe droughts. In an effort to r...

Fire disturbance at high latitudes modifies a broad range of ecosystem properties and processes, thus it is important to monitor the response of vegetation to fire disturbance. This monitoring effort can be aided by lidar remote sensing, which captures information on vegetation structure, particularly canopy height metrics. We used lidar data acqui...

Mapping and monitoring carbon stocks in forested regions of the world, particularly the tropics, has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years as deforestation and forest degradation account for up to 30% of anthropogenic carbon emissions, and are now included in climate change negotiations. We review the potential for satellites to measu...

The effects of land use change on terrestrial carbon budgets for the Black Sea Region were investigated using remote sensing, forest inventory data, and a carbon model. We focus on three countries in the region: Romania, Georgia and Turkey. Rates of land use change between circa-1990 and circa-2000 were quantified by analyzing Landsat imagery. A ca...

Fire disturbance at high latitudes modifies a broad range of ecosystem properties and processes, and these changes extend for decades beyond the disturbance event. It is therefore important to monitor the response of vegetation to fire disturbance, and this can be facilitated by lidar data, which capture information on vegetation structure. We used...

An international regime is under negotiation for compensating tropical nations that succeed in lowering their greenhouse gas emissions from tropical deforestation and forest degradation, which are responsible for approximately one fifth of world-wide carbon emissions. One of the barriers to its success is the participation of countries with current...

Observations from the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) were used in combination with a large data set of field measurements to map woody above-ground biomass (AGB) across tropical Africa. We generated a best-quality cloud-free mosaic of MODIS satellite reflectance observations for the period 2000–2003 and used a regression tree...

Boreal peatlands play a major role in carbon and water cycling and other global environmental processes but understanding this role is constrained by inconsistent representation of peatlands on, or omission from, many global land cover maps. The comparison of several widely used global and continental-scale databases on peatland distribution with a...

Many investigators need and use global land cover maps for a wide variety of purposes. Ironically, after many years of very limited availability, there are now multiple global land cover maps and it is not readily apparent (1) which is most useful for particular applications or (2) how to combine the different maps to provide an improved dataset. T...