Estimation of global carbon emissions from wild fires in forests and croplands

As a cause of global warming, CO2 is most effective green house gas and many countries are trying to reduce emission of that. However, the report of quantitative description is few still because the amount of CO2 emission is difficult to estimate for their complex process. This research is to devise a method to estimate the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from biomass burning such as forest fires and field burning in croplands in Global scale. The methodology mainly composed of two parts including emissions from wild fires of above ground biomass (AGB) and soil organic matter (SOM). The estimated CO2 emissions from 2002 to 2012 were demonstrated and compared with Global Fire Emission Database version 3.1 (GFED 3.1) which is widely used as a global database. A comparison of biomass burning carbon emissions derived from this study and GFED3.1 database in global scale shows that overall the map derived from those two models have very similar spatial patterns. High carbon emission is found at forested area in South America, Central Africa, Far East Russia, North America and Southeast Asia as well as croplands in Central Eurasia and Southeast Asia. A comparison of biomass burning carbon emissions derived from this study and GFED3.1 database in global scale shows that our study estimated biomass burning carbon emissions as 2.62-0.22 PgC/yr whereas GFED is 2.29-0.26 PgC/yr.