Forest Carbon Stocks in Lowland Area of Simien Mountains National Park: Implication for Climate Change Mitigation

Abstract

Forests play a significant role in climate change mitigation by sequestering and storing more carbon from the atmosphere which was released by anthropogenic causes. The overall objective of this study was to estimate carbon stock potential of lowland forest of Simien Mountains National park for climate change mitigation. And it aimed to add values of the lowland forest of the park for climate change mitigation contribution in Ethiopia. The work was accomplished properly using random sampling to estimate the forest carbon in above and below ground biomass by considered each trees and shrubs which had DBH ≥5 cm. Above ground biomass was estimated by using allometric models equation of Brown (1998) while below ground biomass was determined based on the ratio of below ground biomass to above ground biomass factors of (MacDicken, 1997). Dead wood, leaf litter, herb and grass (LHG) and soil organic carbon were conducted according to sampling quadrates data and laboratory result. The results shown that, there were twenty species with a density of 2334 trees and shrubs in the study sites which had DBH ≥5 cm. The mean above ground and below ground biomass carbon stock were 270.89±154.50 and 54.18±30.81 t ha-1 respectively. The mean above ground biomass carbon per species was 20.42±17.99 ton. The mean carbon in dead wood, LHG and soil carbon were 0.7258±1.0479, 0.019±0.008and 242.51±46.42 t ha-1 respectively.

Keywords: Carbon stock Climate change Mitigation Simien Mountains National Park Poisoned food technique