Geospatial Modelling of Forest Carbon Stocks in Burkina Faso, West Africa.
- Advances and Applications in Statistics , 89 (2) : 203-225
Résumé
Protected areas in West Africa play a crucial role in climate changemitigation as the major carbon pools. Yet, the spatial distribution offorest carbon stocks is poorly documented, but required for forestmanagement and carbon monitoring. Assessing the spatial distributionof aboveground biomass and carbon stocks is important for themonitoring of carbon sinks and sources within the national adaptationframework. This paper analyzes the spatial distribution of treeaboveground carbon stocks in two forests using geostatistical tools.We derived tree aboveground biomass and carbon stocks from twoforests using field data of 2844 trees from 174 inventory plots. Thedistribution of forest carbon stocks was analyzed using geospatialmodelling methods. We fitted different variogram models to carbondata and selected the best model for each forest. The best fitted modelwas then used to predict the spatial distribution of forest carbon stockusing geostatistical analysis. The findings showed that the exponentialvariogram model better explains the spatial dependence of carbonstock in Bontioli forest, whereas the power variogram model betterexplains the spatial dependence of stock in Nazinga game ranch. Thevalues of carbon density ranged between 10-45 Mg/ha in Nazinga to18-35 Mg/ha in Bontioli reserve. This study provides a baseline for thegeospatial modelling of forest carbon in West African ecosystems.Such studies should be extended to other forests for a bettermanagement of forest carbon in the region.
Mots-clés
Geostatistics, spatial dependence, aboveground biomass and carbon stocks