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IUFRO Spotlights

2012-01-18

IUFRO Spotlight #4 "The Carbon Conundrum"

In the coming decades, forests will play a major role in our planet's carbon cycle and in our efforts to manage the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Getting a better understanding of whether that role might be good (a sink, absorbing carbon) or bad (a source, adding carbon to the atmosphere), motivated a study by Yude Pan and colleagues, recently published in Science Express. The study identifies global forests as the major terrestrial carbon sink (as opposed to grasslands, peatlands or agricultural lands). It is the first such study to base conclusions on forest inventory and land cover data instead of simulation results.

Further reading:

Ficheros:
spotlight4-carbon-conundrum.pdf186 Ki