SEN4LDN National Demonstration Products on Trends in Carbon Stocks for Land Degradation Neutrality Monitoring

This dataset contains the National Demonstration products that were generated within the ESA SEN4LDN project: "High resolution Land Degradation Neutrality Monitoring" for the sub-indicator on Trends in Carbon Stocks over Colombia, Portugal and Uganda.

The concept of carbon stocks in terms of LDN assessments according to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) Good Practice Guidance is primarily related to the soil carbon pool and its changes. However, since soil organic carbon (SOC) stock change estimates from remote sensing data are not globally readily available (yet), SEN4LDN explored the use of above-ground biomass (AGB) changes as a proxy for carbon stock changes to provide an estimate independent of the other two sub-indicators (i.e. trends in land cover and trends in land productivity). Two approaches were combined (averaged) to quantify trends in carbon stocks (Araza et al., 2023): a stock change approach based on European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) biomass maps (version 5), and a gain-loss approach based on the World Resource Institute (WRI) carbon flux model. Results from our hybrid approach provide the estimate of AGB evolution between 2010 and 2018 as well as the standard deviation, indicating the absolute uncertainty of the modeling results. Maps at 100 m spatial resolution have been generated for three countries (Colombia, Portugal and Uganda) as a feasibility assessment.

The dataset includes:

• Hybrid AGB Average 2010-2018, with file naming SEN4LDN_Hybrid-Avg_V100_2010-2018_<country>_MAP.tif
• Hybrid AGB Standard Deviation 2010-2018, with file naming SEN4LDN_Hybrid-Stdev_V100_2010-2018_<country>_MAP.tif

Products are distributed as country-wide Geotiff files with 0.00088888° resolution (~100m). More information on product format and content can be found in the Product User Guide, available on the SEN4LDN Deliverables web page.

The SEN4LDN project aimed to develop, demonstrate and validate a robust and scientifically-sound EO methodology that exploits the high frequency and spatial resolution of open and free-of-charge satellite imagery to increase the spatial details of national assessments of land degradation and restoration, and provide synoptic information for countries to plan LDN interventions at appropriate scales. More information on http://esa-sen4ldn.org/ .

Click here to view the maps in an interactive Google Earth Engine application.