Source: Conservation Magazine

The number of tree coverage on farms is on the rise, and a recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports has added this hidden cache of carbon storage to the global carbon count. Researchers found out that farms sequester four times as much carbon as current estimates indicate, using remote sensing and a land cover database.

Researchers found that 43 percent of farmland across the globe had at least ten percent tree cover in 2010. Including the carbon sequestering capacity of this tree cover increased storage capacity estimates for farmland from 11.1 gigatonnes of carbon to 45.3 GtC. At least 34 GtCs of this storage capacity is from trees. They also found that between 2000 and 2010, tree cover on farms increased by two percent. This resulted in a 2GtC, or 4.6 percent, increase in biomass carbon.

Of course, when it comes to trees, farms, and carbon, we are still in the red. The annual increase between 2000 and 2010 of tree cover on farms contributed 0.2 GtC per year to global carbon pools. Meanwhile, land use conversion in the tropics causes annual losses of 0.6 to 1.2 GtC.

Including trees on farmland—known as agroforestry—has positive effects beyond carbon sequestration. It improves soil fertility, increases biodiversity and watershed conservation, and can have positive effects on hydrological cycles. So it is not only time to correct the carbon ledgers, the authors say, but to take a more systematic approach to this mitigation opportunity on the many farms where they found tree cover was below its potential.

Read the original article here.