The Effects of Land Use Change on Terrestrial Carbon Dynamics in the Black Sea Region

摘要

The effects of land use change on terrestrial carbon budgets for the Black Sea Region were investigated using remote sensing, forest inventory data, and a carbon model. We focus on three countries in the region: Romania, Georgia and Turkey. Rates of land use change between circa-1990 and circa-2000 were quantified by analyzing Landsat imagery. A carbon book-keeping model was used to quantify these effects in Romania. In Georgia, illegal logging and state-controlled forest harvest are the main sources of land use change. Our analysis shows a small amount of land use change - in the relatively populous Ajdara region, 2.5% of the forested area in 1990 had been converted to non-forest in 2000. Even less land use change was found in Turkey - for the Northeastern part of the country bordering Georgia, 0.28% of the forested land (1,113 ha) had been converted to non forest over the period 1990-2000. For the whole country of Romania, the corresponding number was 2.4%. Integrating this harvest rate with forest inventory data in the carbon book-keeping model indicates that Romanian forests are currently a carbon sink and will remain so until about 2080 if current harvesting rates persist. The current carbon sink of 2.54 TgC/year is approximately 10% of the anthropogenic emission from fossil fuels in Romania.