ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief review of the global carbon cycle and discusses first, the global carbon sink measured in forest inventories, second, sources and sinks of carbon that result from direct human use of forests, and, third, possible reasons why the results from inventories and analyses of land use change do not agree. All of the approaches for calculating the emissions of carbon from land use and land cover change (LULCC) consider the areas affected and the emission coefficients. Remote sensing-based information on recent land cover change has been combined with regional statistics, such as from FAO, to reconstruct spatially explicit land cover reconstructions covering more than the satellite era. Historical changes in LULCC are important for today’s sources and sinks of carbon because the emissions of carbon from deforestation are not instantaneous. The chapter ends with a discussion of the processes affecting carbon storage on land that are and are not amenable to monitoring with satellites.
