SP 02: Modelling and measurements of land use specific greenhouse gas emissions

Objectives
The main objective is to achieve substantial progress in reducing the high uncertainties associated with the assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from land use change and land use management of the global “hot spot” region of Southern Amazonia. The region-specific calibrated and validated model software will be used to simulate different land management effects to elaborate optimized GHG mitigation options. It will be integrated into the computer based decision support system (DSS) of Carbiocial. Furthermore simplified but region- and application-specific emission factors will be developed for local decision makers (basically farmers) and published within a handbook. These are easily expressed as CO2 equivalents and therefore transformed into an economic measure i.e. into “carbon credits”.
Main hypotheses for this work are:
(1) Mechanistic GHG models (like Candy-GHG; DNDC or DayCent) can be operated more precisely than are results derived from the IPCC approach at the plot and landscape scale. Therefore these models are more sufficient to create realistic GHG mitigation options
(2) Mechanistic GHG model calibration and validation at the intensive investigation plots will reduce the uncertainty significantly (Goal: less than 25%.)
(3) Hot spots and hot moments for N2O emissions offset any pure CO2 mitigation attempts (C-stock sustainment and C-sequestering), hence mitigation strategies must focus on the elimination of temporal and spatial „hot spots“of GHG emission.
(4) The “buffer zones” between agricultural land and stream systems prove to be efficient in reducing GHG emission as CO2 equivalents and should be expanded.
(5) Land use change and management changes (e.g. till-> no till) alter soil structure which is an important factor of soil gas exchange. Until now changes of soil structure have not been implemented directly in mechanistic models. Implementing this important factor will increase the precision of mechanistically modelled GHG fluxes from land use change substantially.

Please see also the Poster of SP 02 presented at the Kick-Off Workshop in Cuiabá, Brazil, 6-9 July 2011

Project members:
Dr. Florian Stange
Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources
Dr. Uwe Franko
Centre for Environmental Research
PD Dr. Hermann Jungkunst
Dept. Landscape Ecology, University of Göttingen - Homepage
PhD Student Friedrich Koch
Centre for Environmental Research