Methodology
The use of airborne laser scanning to develop a pixel-based stratification for a verified carbon offset project
-
* Corresponding author: Jordan Golinkoff jgolinkoff@conservationfund.org
1 The Conservation Fund, 14951 "A" Caspar Road, Box 50, Caspar, CA 95420, USA
2 GeoDigital International, McMaster Innovation Park, 175 Longwood Road South, Suite 400A, Hamilton, ON L8P 0A1, Canada
3 The Nature Conservancy, California Regional Office, 201 Mission St., 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105, USA
Carbon Balance and Management 2011, 6:9 doi:10.1186/1750-0680-6-9
Published: 17 October 2011Abstract
Background
The voluntary carbon market is a new and growing market that is increasingly important to consider in managing forestland. Monitoring, reporting, and verifying carbon stocks and fluxes at a project level is the single largest direct cost of a forest carbon offset project. There are now many methods for estimating forest stocks with high accuracy that use both Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) and high-resolution optical remote sensing data. However, many of these methods are not appropriate for use under existing carbon offset standards and most have not been field tested.
Results
This paper presents a pixel-based forest stratification method that uses both ALS and optical remote sensing data to optimally partition the variability across an ~10,000 ha forest ownership in Mendocino County, CA, USA. This new stratification approach improved the accuracy of the forest inventory, reduced the cost of field-based inventory, and provides a powerful tool for future management planning. This approach also details a method of determining the optimum pixel size to best partition a forest.
Conclusions
The use of ALS and optical remote sensing data can help reduce the cost of field inventory and can help to locate areas that need the most intensive inventory effort. This pixel-based stratification method may provide a cost-effective approach to reducing inventory costs over larger areas when the remote sensing data acquisition costs can be kept low on a per acre basis.