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. 2021 Jun 17;11(1):12825.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-92152-9.

Russian forest sequesters substantially more carbon than previously reported

Dmitry Schepaschenko  1   2   3 , Elena Moltchanova  4 , Stanislav Fedorov  5 , Victor Karminov  6   7 , Petr Ontikov  5 , Maurizio Santoro  8 , Linda See  9 , Vladimir Kositsyn  10 , Anatoly Shvidenko  9   11 , Anna Romanovskaya  12 , Vladimir Korotkov  12 , Myroslava Lesiv  9 , Sergey Bartalev  13 , Steffen Fritz  9 , Maria Shchepashchenko  7 , Florian Kraxner  9
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Russian forest sequesters substantially more carbon than previously reported

Dmitry Schepaschenko et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and transition to a new forest inventory system, Russia has reported almost no change in growing stock (+ 1.8%) and biomass (+ 0.6%). Yet remote sensing products indicate increased vegetation productivity, tree cover and above-ground biomass. Here, we challenge these statistics with a combination of recent National Forest Inventory and remote sensing data to provide an alternative estimate of the growing stock of Russian forests and to assess the relative changes in post-Soviet Russia. Our estimate for the year 2014 is 111 ± 1.3 × 109 m3, or 39% higher than the value in the State Forest Register. Using the last Soviet Union report as a reference, Russian forests have accumulated 1163 × 106 m3 yr-1 of growing stock between 1988-2014, which balances the net forest stock losses in tropical countries. Our estimate of the growing stock of managed forests is 94.2 × 109 m3, which corresponds to sequestration of 354 Tg C yr-1 in live biomass over 1988-2014, or 47% higher than reported in the National Greenhouse Gases Inventory.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Predicted mean forest growing stock volume (m3 ha-1) for the year ca 2014 (Generated by Esri ArcGIS Desktop v.10.7, URL: https://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Change in growing stock volume (m3 ha-1) from 1988 to 2014 (average over administrative regions) (Generated by Esri ArcGIS Desktop v.10.7, URL: https://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/). These changes can be categorized into: 1—significant increase in air temperature and drought; 2—substantially increased forest area, which lowers the average GSV density; 3—least (not significant) temperature increase; 4—increase of disturbances: wildfire and harvest (southern part), which offsets the climate stimulation effect.
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