Assessment Of The Carbon Stock In Pine Plantations In Southern Spain Through Als Data And K-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm Based Models

Accurate estimation of forest biomass to enable the mapping of forest C stocks over large areas is of considerable interest nowadays. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) systems bring a new perspective to forest inventories and subsequent biomass estimation. The objective of this research was to combine growth models used to update old inventory data to a reference year, low-density ALS data, and k-nearest neighbor (kNN) algorithm Random Forest to conduct biomass inventories aimed at estimating the C sequestration capacity in large Pinus plantations. We obtained a C stock in biomass (W-t-S) of 12.57 Mg.ha(-1), ranging significantly from 19.93 Mg.ha(-1) for P. halepensis to 49.05 Mg.ha(-1) for P. nigra, and a soil organic C stock of the composite soil samples (0-40 cm) ranging from 20.41 Mg.ha(-1) in P. sylvestris to 37.32 Mg.ha(-1) in P. halepensis. When generalizing these data to the whole area, we obtained an overall C-stock value of 48.01 MgC.ha(-1), ranging from 23.96 MgC.ha(-1) for P. halepensis to 58.09 MgC.ha(-1) for P. nigra. Considering the mean value of the on-site C stock, the study area sustains 1,289,604 Mg per hectare (corresponding to 4,732,869 Mg CO2), with a net increase of 4.79 Mg.ha(-1).year(-1). Such C cartography can help forest managers to improve forest silviculture with regard to C sequestration and, thus, climate change mitigation.