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Carbon stocks of billions of individual African dryland trees estimated

An inventory of nearly 10 billion individual trees has been compiled for the African drylands, estimating biomass and carbon stocks. The data will aid dryland restoration projects and assessments of the land carbon budget.
  1. Jules Bayala

    1. Jules Bayala is at the Centre for International Forestry Research — World Agroforestry, Sahel Office, Ouagadougou 06 BP 9478, Burkina Faso.

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  2. Meine van Noordwijk

    1. Meine van Noordwijk is at the Centre for International Forestry Research — World Agroforestry, Southeast Asia Regional Programme, Bogor 16115, Indonesia.

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The fewer trees there are, the more important they become. This is especially true in dryland ecosystems, where scattered trees provide a range of crucial environmental services and benefits to local inhabitants. Indeed, trees will be instrumental in helping dryland communities meet many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Detailed information about trees is essential for managing and restoring dryland ecosystems, and for understanding their role in storing carbon as the climate changes, yet such data have been lacking. Writing in Nature, Tucker et al.1 address this issue by providing an inventory of carbon stocks for billions of individual trees in the African drylands.

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Nature 615, 35-36 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00531-1

References

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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