The Swedish UNFCCC
1-reporting of the LULUCF2-sector is based on methods in
compliance with the “Good practice” as described by the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC). Biomass and soil inventory data from the Swedish
Inventory of Forests is the major source of information used to quantify changes in
the various carbon pools on forest land. Even if the reported uncertainties in soil
carbon changes are small from a statistical perspective, they are large in relation to
the total Swedish emissions of green house gases. This is due to the fact that the
soil carbon pool is so large, that even small and statistically non-significant
changes may have an impact on the Swedish CO
2 balance. Sampling based methods
may also result in considerable inter annual variations that may look conspicuous
in the reporting. Because of the uncertainty and inter annual variations there
has been a discussion on the methods used and if there are possibilities to lower the
uncertainty and to get more stable estimates of soil carbon changes by combining
measurements and models. In this study results from the two soil carbon models,
Yasso07 and Q, were compared with repeated measurements of the soil inventory
during the years 1994 to 2000. Soil carbon fluxes were simulated with the two
models from 1926 to 2000 with Monte Carlo methodology to estimate uncertainty
ranges. The results from the models agreed well with measured data. The simulations
of Yasso07 and Q resulted in a soil organic carbon stock in year 2000 of
1600 Mton C and 1580 Mton C, respectively while the measured carbon pool was
1670 Mton C. The annual change in soil organic carbon varies substantially between
the three methods mainly due to different assumptions regarding annual
climate variation. However, the five year averaged mean of annual soil organic
carbon change for the two periods 1994-1998 and 1996-2000 indicate the size and
direction of the estimated annual changes agree reasonable well. The mean annual
change for the two periods was for the Q-model 5.5 Mton C yr
-1 and 5.6 Mton C yr-
1
with a confidence interval of 2.1-10.7 Mton C yr-1, and for the Yasso07-model 3.7
Mton C yr
-1 and 0.9 Mton C yr-1 respectively with a confidence interval ranging
between -5 to 12.6 and -7 to 9.8 Mton C yr
-1 respectively. The mean annual change
for the two periods estimated using NFI-data was 1.6 M ton C yr
-1 and 2.5 M ton C
yr
-1 with a standard error of 2 The general conclusion drawn from this study is that
both sampling and the models Yasso07 and Q are possible tools to predict the soil
organic carbon accumulation and annual changes for Swedish forest soils. The
estimates based on measurements as well as the modelled results indicate an increase
in carbon stocks in Swedish forest soils. This study does not support a
change of method from inventory to model predictions. However, the agreement
between the methods shows that the models are suitable as a complement to other
soil carbon estimation methods. They are particularly useful for projections and we
recommend a further development of the modelling tools.
2009.