Russian forest sequesters substantially more carbon than previously reported

Shchepashchenko, D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7814-4990, Moltchanova, E., Fedorov, S., Karminov, V., Ontikov, P., Santoro, M., See, L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2665-7065, Kositsyn, V., Shvidenko, A., Romanovskaya, A., Korotkov, V., Lesiv, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9846-3342, Bartalev, S., Fritz, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0420-8549, Shchepashchenko, M., & Kraxner, F. (2021). Russian forest sequesters substantially more carbon than previously reported. Scientific Reports 11 (1) e12825. 10.1038/s41598-021-92152-9.

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Abstract

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and transition to a new forest inventory system, Russia has reported almost no change in growing stock (+ 1.8%) and biomass (+ 0.6%). Yet remote sensing products indicate increased vegetation productivity, tree cover and above-ground biomass. Here, we challenge these statistics with a combination of recent National Forest Inventory and remote sensing data to provide an alternative estimate of the growing stock of Russian forests and to assess the relative changes in post-Soviet Russia. Our estimate for the year 2014 is 111 ± 1.3 × 109 m3, or 39% higher than the value in the State Forest Register. Using the last Soviet Union report as a reference, Russian forests have accumulated 1163 × 106 m3 yr-1 of growing stock between 1988–2014, which balances the net forest stock losses in tropical countries. Our estimate of the growing stock of managed forests is 94.2 × 109 m3, which corresponds to sequestration of 354 Tg C yr-1 in live biomass over 1988–2014, or 47% higher than reported in the National Greenhouse Gases Inventory.

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