Project sites
 

Test areas for full carbon budgets:

The test areas, which are representative for the major European forest ecosystem regions are located in the Boreal, the Temperate, the Mediterranean, and the Alpine forest regions:

• Finland: Southern Coast of Finland, South-Eastern Finland, and Northern Carelia
• Germany: Saxonian Foothills, Taunus
• Austria: Upper Styria
• Spain: Catalonia

In all test areas, intensive studies on forests have been carried out and, thus, provide a sound basis for scientific work and the evaluation of the developed methods.

The Boreal forest region: Finland

Three test areas from Finland will be used, 1) Southern Coast of Finland 2)South-Eastern Finland 3) Northern Carelia.
The reason for using 3 test sites is the different availability of microwave data and of latest field measurements. All test areas represent managed boreal forests, Southern Coast of Finland and South-Eastern Finland belong to the Southern Boreal and the Northern Carelia test area belongs to the Middle-Boreal forests. The forests are dominated by Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.), Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst.), and birch (Betula spp.) with some aspen (Populus tremula L.) and alder (Alnus spp.). The spruce proportion is higher in the Southern Coast of Finland than in the South-Eastern Finland and Northern Carelia sites. The terrain is flat, except the Northern Carelia site.

All areas have been covered several times with field plots of the Finnish NFI. The newest inventory in the Southern Coast of Finland and South-Eastern Finland sites are from the year 1998 and in the Northern Carelia site from the year 2000. The field plot density is one plot per each 277 ha in the Southern Coast of Finland and South-Eastern Finland sites and one plot per each 288 ha in the Northern Carelia site. A dense grid of field plots is available from some sub-areas of the Northern Carelia site. The field plot density in those areas is one plot per each 20 ha. All sites have been analysed twice with multi-source inventory, i.e. with Landsat TM images and digital map data, in addition to field measurements. Thus a full coverage with thematic maps is available. The Southern Coast of Finland and South-Eastern Finland sites have been covered with E-SAR measurements during the summer 2000 by DLR.
 

The Temperate forest region: Germany

The German test site encompasses the entire federal state of Thuringia in the heart of the country. Thuringia has about 16.171,5 km² with 2.411.387 inhabitants (150 inhabitants per km²). Roughly one third of the state is covered with forests, what represents about 540.600 ha of mainly spruce, especially in the Thuringia forest and broadleaved forests in the northern parts. The national forest inventory data for Thuringia were utilised for the bottom up approach of the CarboInvent project. the data set includes 15.609 sinlge tree records on 727 plots with 38 tree species. The topography of Thuringia is characterised by the lowest altitude in the Unstrut valley in the North- East with 114m over sea level and the highest peak in the South-West with 983 m over sea level, which is called “Großer Beerberg”. The extension from North to South is 160 km while the East to West extension is nearly 200 km. The most conspicuous geographical feature of Thuringia is the Thuringia Forest (Thüringer Wald), a mountain chain in the southwest. In the northwest Thuringia includes a small part of the Harz Mountains. The eastern part of Thuringia is generally a plain. The Saale River runs through these lowlands from south to north.

The Alpine forest region: Austria

The Alpine test area Upper Styria extends from the "Sengsengebirge" in the north, to the "Gurktaler Alpen" in the south and is dominated by the high mountain character. The highest peak, the "Hoher Dachstein", reaches 2,995 m. The areal extent of the test site is 60 km in east-west- and 90 km in north-south direction. The potential natural forest community of the mountain range are the high-montane mixed species forest (spruce-fir-beech and spruce-larch) and the subalpine spruce forest. Most of the forests have been transformed into spruce forests with a small share of beech. The alpine range is covered by heathlands with characteristic dwarf shrubs (Vaccinium sp., Rhododendron) and with alpine pine (Pinus mugo). At sites with very shallow soils a patchy cover of early successional species is found. Extensive information on forests and soils as well as ancillary data is available for the project.

The Mediterranean forest region: Spain
 

The Mediterranean test area Catalonia is in NE Spain (31,930 km2), comprising the provinces of Barcelona, Girona, Lleida and Tarragona, is bounded on the north by the Pyrenees Mountains on the west by the region of Aragon, and on the east by the Mediterranean Sea. The climate is mainly mediterranean with mild winters, warm and dry summers. The Pyrenees mountains, reaching elevations of over 3,000 m, and some other topographical feature, such as the transversal and pre-littoral ranges, create clear topographical climatic gradients where Mediterranean-type biomes gradually change to temperate, boreal-like (subalpine) and tundra like (alpine) types, corresponding to the euro-siberian and boreoalpine phytogeographic regions. From the coast to the central planes, the increase in continentality and the decrease in rainfall create another major gradient from a winter -warm humid climate to a winter-cold semiarid Mediterranean one (where annual rainfall is as low as 300-400 mm and shrubs subdesertic types of vegetation become dominant). In Catalonia, holm oak, Aleppo pine forests dominate extensive areas of the forest territory. Structure and dynamics of these forests are determined mainly by water availability and temporal changes in canopy cover after disturbances. Forested land covers about 10,500 km2 or 33% of the Catalonia area.
 

Test areas for “Kyoto” carbon budget
Afforestation / reforestation project in Hungary as a test-site for monitoring of stock changes in project-based reforestation in JI

n Hungary, afforestation and reforestation has a long history in the 20th century. In the last few decades, some 600 thousand hectares were reforested, increasing the forested land from 11% to 17%. A large proportion of the new forests can be found in the Eastern flat part of the country, called the Great Hungarian Plain (GHP). After a drop in the rates of afforestations in the 90's, mainly because of lack of resources, a new wave of afforestation is expected. This is due to the current economic and political process of Hungary becoming a member of the EU in a few years time. The areal distribution of the afforestation coincides with the pattern of croplands. These lands are fragmented, and the size of contiguous blocks varies between several hectares to several tens of hectares. Contiguous blocks of several ha afforestation are rare. On the other hand, the same or similar species may have been used in many afforestations in entire regions, making it possible to establish test blocks of several hundred ha of the same species where the individual blocks are not far from each other.

Afforestation and reforestation at regional level in Ireland (monitoring for national reporting under KP Article 3.3)

Woodlands were once a dominant feature of the Irish landscape. However, centuries of exploitation created the situation where, at the turn of the twentieth century, only 1% of the land area was forested. Since the 1950’s there has been a major national commitment to restore forest cover and there are now some 600,000 hectares of forest, which is equivalent to 9% of the land area (Forest Service 2000). Species composition is 80% coniferous. Competition with agriculture has meant that afforestation has largely been limited to land considered marginal and sub-marginal for agriculture.

Deforestation at regional level

One of the test sites in Box 1 will be selected for monitoring deforestation activities as defined under Kyoto Protocol Article 3.3. The selection of test site will be done such that the area undergoing deforestation sufficient for the purposes of this project. Key challenges are detecting forest losses, distinguishing between normal forest harvest and deforestation, and assessing the carbon stocks of forests prior to deforestation.