Biomass and carbon stocks in the Brazilian Amazon: A new approach

Abstract

The Brazilian Amazon rainforest concentrates one of the largest stocks of biomass and carbon on the planet. Given its importance as a carbon sink, studies on the quantification of biomass in this tropical forest are essential to seek greater understanding of issues related to climate change. However, data relating to biomass and carbon inventories in Brazil are currently scarce or found in a dispersed manner in several databases, often with restricted access. In the present study, an unprecedented approach was made with forest inventory data from the RADAMBRASIL Project - available on the BDiA platform - using the resampling bootstrap method, for biomass and carbon estimates in the Amazon Biome. The KDD Process was used to extract information from the raw database. Three equations for Ombrophilous Dense Forest and two for Open Ombrophilous Forest were used, for large trees (DBH ≥ 30 cm). The results showed that biomass estimates from Chambers et al. (2001) equation presented lower values of standard error and bias, for Ombrophilous Dense Forest data. Better results were found in the estimates from the equation of Nogueira et al. (2008) [2], for Open Ombrophilous Forest data. It can be concluded that these two equations are the most indicated in the estimates of biomass and carbon for the analyzed data. In addition, the analysis indicated that larger trees are representative of the total composition of the biomass and carbon stocks in the Amazon Biome (~163 Mg.ha-1, for Dense Forest, compared to literature values, of 250-350 Mg.ha-1).