Largely underestimated carbon emission from land use and land cover change in the conterminous US
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2019-11
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John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Abstract
Carbon (C) emission from land use and land cover change (LULCC) is the most uncertain term in the global carbon budget primarily due to limited LULCC data and inadequate model capability (e.g., under-represented agricultural managements). We take the commonly used FAOSTAT-based global Land Use Harmonization data (LUH2) and a new high-resolution multi-source harmonized national LULCC database (YLmap) to drive a land ecosystem model (DLEM) in the conterminous US. We found that recent cropland abandonment and forest recovery may have been overestimated in the LUH2 data derived from national statistics, causing previously reported C emissions from land use have been underestimated due to definition of cropland and aggregated LULCC signals at coarse resolution. This overestimation leads to a
strong C sink (30.3 ± 2.5 Tg C yr-1) in model simulations driven by LUH2 in the US during the 1980-2016 period, while we find a moderate C source (13.6 ± 3.5 Tg C yr-1) when using YLmap. This divergence implies that previous C budget analyses based on the global LUH2 dataset have underestimated C emission in the US owing to suitable cropland delineation and aggregated land conversion signals at coarse resolution which YLmap overcomes. Thus, to obtain more accurate quantification of LULCC-induced C emission and better serve global C budget accounting, it is urgently needed to develop fine-scale country-specific LULCC data to characterize details of land conversion.
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This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Yu, Zhen, Chaoqun Lu, Hanqin Tian, and Josep G. Canadell. "Largely underestimated carbon emission from land use and land cover change in the conterminous United States." Global change biology 25, no. 11 (2019): 3741-3752, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14768. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. This article may not be enhanced, enriched or otherwise transformed into a derivative work, without express permission from Wiley or by statutory rights under applicable legislation. Copyright notices must not be removed, obscured or modified. The article must be linked to Wiley’s version of record on Wiley Online Library and any embedding, framing or otherwise making available the article or pages thereof by third parties from platforms, services and websites other than Wiley Online Library must be prohibited.