Biomass Harmonization is a coordinated effort of scientists to release forest-carbon estimates obtained with space data in a comparable manner. This helps identify underlying assumptions, definitions and uncertainty-estimation frameworks (Ref 1). By collaborating with scientists and policy-makers in various countries, this effort also aims to align the carbon estimates with policy guidelines, which will ease their uptake for climate reporting purposes.
An example of this effort is research that leverages data from NASA’s GEDI and ICESat-2 missions, and ESA’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI) to produce IPCC Tier 1 default biomass values for natural forests (Ref 2). The integration of the various space-derived datasets is conducted within an open-science framework (Ref 3) aimed at enhancing the flexibility and adaptability of the estimates by countries.
The CEOS Biomass Harmonization activity is funded by the NASA Carbon Monitoring Systems (CMS) 2022 and hosted on the NASA MAAP, where open science and a public repository of source code (Ref 4) permits transparency in a collaborative environment between science teams and national policy experts.
References:
Ref 1 – https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad0b60
Ref 3 – https://daac.ornl.gov/CMS/guides/CMS_Global_Forest_Age.html
Ref 4 – The public Github Repository: https://github.com/CEOSBiomassHarmonization/NASA_CMS/tree/main/NASA_CMS_2023