Modeling and Mapping Carbon Stock Distribution and Changes in Different Vegetation Types of Selected Districts of Tanzania

An important aspect in determining ecosystem benefits such as carbon sequestration potential in forest carbon projects is accurate assessment of carbon stocks and their changes across spatial and temporal scale. To determine the levels of precisions on carbon changes across landscape scale requires baselines, i.e. historical trends against which additional carbon benefits due to carbon projects implementation can be determined.

Although, there has been number of initiatives to estimate carbon stocks and their potentials for carbon emission through sequestration in Tanzanian forests and woodlands, yet there is little efforts to establish reference scenarios to enable arguments for baseline carbon in forestry systems. Further, the capacity to map carbon distribution for baseline determination is inadequate requiring concerted effort to modeling and mapping carbon distribution for baseline determination at both national and sub- national levels. Efforts to establish Forest Reference Emission Levels (FREL) in Tanzania are underway and this report is expected to contribute towards this process in establishing the current conditions of emissions especially at sub regional/district level and plausible future scenarios of carbon change in different ecosystem