A new tool to monitor the carbon budget of vegetation: first application to the African continent
How do the vegetation carbon stocks change at the continental scale? What are the drivers of these changes? These are central questions for the sciences of Climate and for the application of international agreements on climate. A study coordinated by the University of Copenhagen (1) has developed a new approach to investigate this issue. In collaboration with scientific teams (2) from CEA, CNES and CNRS, INRA has coordinated the development of the new data set derived from space-borne microwave observations which is used to quantify vegetation carbon stocks. The study demonstrates that over the African continent and during the 2010-2016 period, the net carbon balance is negative (corresponding to a decrease of the quantity of carbon stored in the vegetation biomass) and that most of the carbon losses occurred in dryland savannahs. These results were published on 9th April 2018 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
