Largely underestimated carbon emission from land use and land cover change in the conterminous United States

Carbon (C) emission from land use and land cover change (LULCC) is the most uncertain term in the global carbon budget primarily due to limited LULCC data and inadequate model capability (e.g., under-represented agricultural managements). We take the commonly used FAOSTAT-based global Land Use Harmonization data (LUH2) and a new high-resolution multi-source harmonized national LULCC database (YLmap) to drive a land ecosystem model (DLEM) in the conterminous US. We found that recent cropland abandonment and forest recovery may have been overestimated in the LUH2 data derived from national statistics, causing previously reported C emissions from land use have been underestimated due to definition of cropland and aggregated LULCC signals at coarse resolution. This overestimation leads to a strong C sink (30.3 ± 2.5 Tg C yr-1 ) in model simulations driven by LUH2 in the US during the 1980-2016 period, while we find a moderate C source (13.6 ± 3.5 Tg C yr-1 ) when using YLmap. This divergence implies that previous C budget analyses based on the global LUH2 dataset have underestimated C emission in the US owing to suitable cropland delineation and aggregated land conversion signals at coarse resolution which YLmap overcomes. Thus, to obtain more accurate quantification of LULCC-induced C emission and better serve global C budget accounting, it is urgently needed to develop fine-scale country-specific LULCC data to characterize details of land conversion. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

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