Forestry: a helping hand for solving our climate problem?
Europe’s forests are a large storage pool of carbon and continuously take up CO2 from the atmosphere. This is an ecosystem service we desperately need to mitigate climate change. However, how do we know how much CO2 these forests exactly take up? Quantifying this is a huge challenge. Measurements of atmospheric CO2 provide a top-down perspective on what happens on land. In addition, by measuring tree diameters, researchers can calculate the uptake of CO2 bottom-up. In my research, I will combine both top-down and bottom-up methods to better estimate forest CO2 uptake in Europe.