Abstract

Carbon emissions from land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) are part of the human perturbation to the global carbon cycle and started in fact before the Industrial Era when fossil fuel CO2emissions appeared. Since 1850, estimated cumulative LULCC emissions represent one-third of total cumulative anthropogenic CO2emissions. However, the uncertainties in LULCC emissions are large due to lack of direct observations. I will address several aspects on how to reduce the uncertainties in the global LULCC and carbon cycle using models and observations. I will introduce the global land cover changes from the ESA CCI global land cover dataset and methods to estimate LULCC carbon emissions. I will then present the new estimates of soil organic carbon dynamics after grassland related LULCC, and the biomass-constrained historical LULCC emissions based on field measurements and remote sensing data. For future LULCC, I will show the new development of bioenergy crop modelling in the global vegetation model (ORCHIDEE). Finally, combing all the modelling results and observations, I will present the reduced uncertainties in the global carbon cycle by applying a Bayesian inversion framework.

Presenter Profile

Dr. Wei Li works as a postdoctoral researcher atLe Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, France. His research focuses on land use change and the global carbon cycle. For the historical land use change, he estimated the carbon fluxes from soil and biomass using field measurements and remote sensing data. He analyzed and compared the global gross and net land use change from several datasets for the recent decades. He recently focuses more on the model development in the global vegetation model (ORCHIDEE) to implement bioenergy crop modeling and applying this model for future BECCS climate mitigation scenario simulations. He has broad interests in the multiple ways to quantify the ecosystem responses to land use change and to reduce the uncertainties in the global carbon cycle.