Assess carbon pool dynamics in the tree layer

This WP aims at utilizing existing vegetation databases in order to estimate carbon pools in tree layers in West Africa. Despite the availability of datasets from previous environmental-related projects, the potential of these datasets in terms of offering background information on carbon pools of West African vegetation has not yet been harnessed.

Up to now, we received 12 datasets from direct contacts to data owners and from databases (Fig. 1a). In total, we have now 100,250 observations from 8 different West African countries (Fig. 1b), which is a great step forward and will ensure a high quality (in spatial terms) and quantity (number of proxies) of the datasets for WP1. All datasets are already cleaned, sorted and arranged into plot data (site name, GPS Coordinates, plot ID) and species data (species name, tree diameter at breast height, tree height, and wood density) as well as assigned to their aridity index (Fig. 2). Still, some necessary parameters to assess carbon pools based on Chave et al. (2014) such as tree height and wood density are not yet available in some of the datasets received. We will further identify these from literature studies and databases such as TRY and GlobAllomeTree for the tree species investigated in the obtained vegetation datasets.

Project members involved:

James N. Ofori with Prof. Dr. Anja Linstädter  (UP)