Aboveground Carbon Storage and Its Links to Stand Structure, Tree Diversity and Floristic Composition in South-Eastern Tanzania.

ABSTRACT: African savannas and dry forests represent a large, but poorly quantified store of biomass carbon and biodiversity. Improving this information is hindered by a lack of recent forest inventories, which are necessary for calibrating earth observation data and for evaluating the relationship between carbon stocks and tree diversity in the context of forest conservation (for example, REDD+). Here, we present new inventory data from south-eastern Tanzania, comprising more than 15,000 trees at 25 locations located across a gradient of aboveground woody carbon (AGC) stocks. We find that larger trees disproportionately contribute to AGC, with the largest 3.7% of individuals containing half the carbon. Tree species diversity and carbon stocks were positively related, implying a potential functional

SUBMITTER: McNicol IM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6438643 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature