Carbon stocks across Brazilian macro-ecosystems: ecological structure, methodological uncertainty, and implications for carbon accounting

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:This paper offers a robust synthesis of tropical carbon stock data and identifies key gaps (e.g., belowground biomass) that researchers should address.

🏢実務担当者:Companies relying on carbon offsets or nature-based solutions can use these baselines to improve the credibility of their carbon accounting.

🏛政策担当者:Policymakers involved in carbon market design or national GHG inventories should note the need for standardized measurement protocols to reduce uncertainty.

Tropical and subtropical ecosystems are major carbon reservoirs, yet robust carbon accounting across those landscapes remains limited by environmental heterogeneity, uneven representation of pools, and inconsistent measurement methods. Brazil provides a globally relevant model system for tropical carbon accounting due to its diversity of macro-ecosystems and intense land-use transitions. We synthesized 1,299 standardized records from 74 peer-reviewed studies across six Brazilian macro-ecosystems to examine how carbon pools are distributed among ecosystem types, how these patterns compare with global expectations, how much reported variation reflects ecological versus methodological drivers, and which data gaps most constrain reliable carbon accounting. We integrated records for aboveground biomass, belowground biomass, soil organic carbon, and ecosystem-level carbon, standardized all values to Mg C ha⁻¹, and evaluated variability using hierarchical mixed-effects models with climatic moderators. Carbon storage followed a clear ecological hierarchy: humid forests had the highest aboveground biomass, coastal wetlands had the greatest soil organic carbon, and ecotones had the highest ecosystem-level carbon. Relative to agricultural baselines, peak native-system values were approximately five- to sixteen-fold higher across major pools. The best-performing model included climate moderators and explained most of the observed variation (conditional R² = 0.972), although study-level clustering remained high (intraclass correlation coefficient = 0.965), indicating substantial methodological influence on reported estimates. Sampling effort was also strongly unbalanced: soil organic carbon was the most frequently reported pool (n = 581), whereas belowground biomass remained severely underrepresented (n = 45). These findings provide quantitative baselines for Brazilian macro-ecosystems and support the adoption of standardized, multi-pool, depth-explicit protocols to improve monitoring, reporting, and verification of carbon stocks. Methodological heterogeneity remains a dominant source of variation in tropical carbon‑stock estimates, reinforcing the need for consistent approaches to support credible Nature‑based Climate Solutions (NbCS), robust monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) systems, and carbon‑based mitigation strategies.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19445737first seen 2026-05-05 19:13:42