Carnegie Airborne Observatory: First high-res national carbon map - Panama

A team of researchers has for the first time mapped the above ground carbon density of an entire country in high fidelity.

This is the first high-resolution national carbon map. The highest carbon stocks in Panama are in the humid forests on the Caribbean side (red). 

The lowest carbon stocks are in developed areas (blue). 

Credit: Carnegie Airborne Observatory

They integrated field data with satellite imagery and high-resolution airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data to map the vegetation and to quantify carbon stocks throughout the Republic of Panama.

The results are the first maps that report carbon stocks locally in areas as small as a hectare (2.5 acres) and yet cover millions of hectares in a short time.

The system has the lowest demonstrated uncertainty of any carbon-counting approach yet—a carbon estimation uncertainty of about 10% in each hectare overflown with LiDAR as compared to field-based estimates.

Importantly, it can be used across a wide range of vegetation types worldwide.

The new system, described in Carbon Balance and Management, will greatly boost conservation and efforts to mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration.

It will also inform our understanding of how carbon storage can be used to assess other fundamental ecosystem characteristics such as hydrology, habitat quality, and biodiversity.

The approach provides much-needed technical support for carbon-based economic activities such as the United Nations Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) program in developing countries.

Panama has complex landscapes, with variable topography, and diverse ecosystems (ranging from grasslands and mangroves to shrublands and dense forests).

As a result, Panama is an ideal laboratory to develop and test a method for quantifying above ground carbon.

Lead author Greg Asner commented: "Three things make this national-scale study unique."

• Firstly, Panama is an outstanding place for testing carbon mapping approaches due in part to the long-term forest studies that have been undertaken by our partners at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI).
• Secondly, we have applied the very latest techniques using high-performance instrumentation, resulting in demonstrably high accuracy at fine spatial resolution.
• Thirdly, the partnership permitted us to estimate our errors in a novel way, and we did so over every point on Panamanian soil.

In addition to Carnegie and STRI researchers, scientists from McGill University and UC-Berkeley combined measurement methods—an extensive and essential network of ground-based plot sampling, satellite imagery, and LiDAR measurements from the Carnegie Airborne Observatory—to achieve the unprecedented accuracy.