title: High-fidelity national carbon mapping for resource management and REDD+.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  High fidelity carbon mapping has the potential to greatly advance national resource management and to encourage international action toward climate change mitigation. However, carbon inventories based on field plots alone cannot capture the heterogeneity of carbon stocks, and thus remote sensing-assisted approaches are critically important to carbon mapping at regional to global scales. We advanced a high-resolution, national-scale carbon mapping approach applied to the Republic of Panama - one of the first UN REDD + partner countries.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Integrating measurements of vegetation structure collected by airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) with field inventory plots, we report LiDAR-estimated aboveground carbon stock errors of ~10% on any 1-ha land parcel across a wide range of ecological conditions. Critically, this shows that LiDAR provides a highly reliable replacement for inventory plots in areas lacking field data, both in humid tropical forests and among drier tropical vegetation types. We then scale up a systematically aligned LiDAR sampling of Panama using satellite data on topography, rainfall, and vegetation cover to model carbon stocks at 1-ha resolution with estimated average pixel-level uncertainty of 20.5 Mg C ha-1 nationwide.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The national carbon map revealed strong abiotic and human controls over Panamanian carbon stocks, and the new level of detail with estimated uncertainties for every individual hectare in the country sets Panama at the forefront in high-resolution ecosystem management. With this repeatable approach, carbon resource decision-making can be made on a geospatially explicit basis, enhancing human welfare and environmental protection.
authors.affiliation: Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. gpa@carnegiescience.edu.
authors.forename: Gregory P
authors.initials: GP
authors.lastname: Asner
authors.forename: Joseph
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Mascaro
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Anderson
authors.forename: David E
authors.initials: DE
authors.lastname: Knapp
authors.forename: Roberta E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Martin
authors.forename: Ty
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kennedy-Bowdoin
authors.forename: Michiel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: van Breugel
authors.forename: Stuart
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Davies
authors.forename: Jefferson S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Hall
authors.forename: Helene C
authors.initials: HC
authors.lastname: Muller-Landau
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Potvin
authors.forename: Wayne
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Sousa
authors.forename: Joseph
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wright
authors.forename: Eldridge
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bermingham