Background and Objective

Germany is legally oligated to provide annually the National Inventory Report for the German Greenhouse Gas Inventory due to the convention on climate change, the Kyoto protocol and the EU decision 280/2004/EC.

The reporting includes among the other sectors Energy, Industrial Processes, Solvent, Agriculture and Waste, the bilances for carbon sinks and sources for the sector Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry too.

The calculation of carbon sinks and sources in German forest are based on data from the National Forest Inventory (NFI) and the German Soil Condition Survey in Forest. To meet the good practice guidelines Carbon Inventories are conducted in addition to the regular NFI, which will repeated every 10 years . These Carbon Inventories are identical to the NFI in Methodology but are concentrated on relevant pools for the reporting only, like above-ground and below-ground living biomass and dead wood.

The carbon inventory 2017 aims at:

1. the survey of storages and their changes in the relavant carbon pools
2. the tracking of geographic explicit land use changes
3. the development of survey methods for the next NFI

and acts as an inventory on a sub-sample between two regular NFI

Approach

For the Carbon Inventory 2017 methods and software from the National Forest Inventory are used. The inventory method and the data collection are described in a field manual . For the data collection in the field we use our special data collection software.

Our Research Questions

How much carbon is stored in living biomass and in dead wood in 2017?

Did the carbon storage increase or decrease since 2012?

In which way changed the forest conditions in Germany, e.g. the tree species composition, the growing stock?

New IT- and measurement technologies will tested for possible  further application in the next regular NFI.