Day 9: Carbon in Landscapes 18.8.17

Today’s topic was Climate change, forest, carbon and Carboscen presented by Docent Markku Larjavaara of VITRI, University of Helsinki. He explained the definition of recent global change and climate change from the concept that increasing carbon dioxide influences temperature and which then influences precipitation pattern. Along the way he did mentioned that it is easier to measure the changes to temperature pattern then the changes in the precipitation pattern. He showed us the interconnectivity between the plants, greenhouse gas and climate and talked about the influence of albedo in the global temperature. Snow with higher albedo reflects more light back to the space compared to the low albedo of the forest which absorbs more light. Also talked about the influence of ocean current on the global temperature.

But our focus subject for the day was plant, carbon dioxide. Because of the increasing carbon dioxide, the global temperature is increasing as a result of the greenhouse effect. This increasing temperature and carbon dioxide is good for the plant growth and increasing biomass as a result of the phenomenon called carbon fertilization.

He defined carbon pool and carbon flux in the ecosystem and he mentioned that in his work is focused on carbon pool. He showed us a figure of a tree and showed that basically every part of the tree contains carbon. Defined the biomass of the ecosystem and not only the biomass above ground makes the whole biomass of the ecosystem but dead parts of the plant in and on the ground, are also part of the biomass.

Next we participated in a quiz. He introduced us to the carbon payment system, an incentive based system for maintaining or increasing carbon pool in the forest. But also discussed the difficulties of implementing this system. He introduced to us a software called Carboscen which quantifies the ecosystem carbon if the land uses are known and showed us how this software works. We participated in a workshop where we used Carboscen to investigate scenarios of our choice and we produced five scenarios and presented our result. The scenarios were cocoa -forest landscape of southern Ghana, cropland-tea-forest landscape of Sylhet Bangladesh, land use of Montana United States, Forest- cropland of south China and land use of Congo Basin.

After our presentation Markku showed his work using Carboscen and application of Carboscen as a workshop in 8 different landscape in 4 different countries Mexico, Peru, Tanzania and Indonesia. Also showed us application of Carboscen when carbon simulation was based on interviews, topic of the interview was carbon rent and investigated countries where again same but with the addition of Finland and showed us the results. Last application of Carboscen that he showed us was simulation based on Biodiversity and Biodiversity value. That brought us to the end of the days lectures.

-Ahmed Shahriyer

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