Title : Development of a unified national system for monitoring carbon pools and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems of Russia
Abstract:
The development of a national system for monitoring carbon pools and greenhouse gas fluxes of terrestrial ecosystems has commenced in the Russian Federation under the innovative project "Unified National Monitoring System for Climatically Active Substances" since 2022. The consortium consists of 21 organizations, including institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, universities, and state unitary enterprise. For a reliable assessment of the ability of ecosystems to absorb climatically active substances, an integrated system of on-ground and remote sensing measurements, assessment methods and models are developed. A unified monitoring network covers diverse ecosystems types, with sets of models created for at the local, regional and national forecasts. Simultaneously, an integrated information and analytical system is being developed to collect, storage and analyze the information. The establishment of routine data collection on the carbon and nitrogen cycle within natural ecosystems of the country, including forests, steppe, tundra, forest-tundra, forest-steppe, swamps and wetlands, as well as agricultural ecosystems and abandoned farmlands overgrown with trees and shrubs, and analysis of monitoring data results at different spatial levels are possible only when using the developed in the project methods for integration of ground-based measurements, remote sensing data and mathematical modeling. An approach has been developed for designing a monitoring network for assessing the carbon balance at the national level, which makes it possible to ensure the spatial, typological and statistical representativeness of the country's terrestrial ecosystems, and predict their state and resilience under rapid climate change. The first phase of the project is currently underway, focused on network organization, methodology harmonization, baseline data collection on vegetation and soil characteristics, and assessment of carbon balance and greenhouse gas fluxes. The obtained data are used for validation and initialization of simulation models, which are applied for projective assessment of expected changes in carbon pools and fluxes of greenhouse gases in terrestrial ecosystems under different scenarios of land-use and climate change. The improvement of National Cadastre of greenhouse gases based on new databases is expected. Discussion encompass the developed methodology and methods, the monitoring network project, and the obtained and anticipated outcomes.
