Organic carbon concentrations and stocks in Romanian mineral forest soils

Abstract

Estimating soils organic carbon stock and its change in time is an actual concern for scientists and climate change policy makers. The present article firstly focus on determination of C stocks in Romania on forest soil types, as well as development of the spatial distribution mapping using a Geographic Information System (GIS) and also the secondly on the quantification of uncertainty associated with currently available data on C concentration on forest soils geometrical layers. Determination of C stock was done based on forest management plans database created over 2000-2006. Unlike original database, the data for this study was harmonized on following depths: 0-10 cm, 10-20 cm, 20-40 cm, and > 40 cm. Then, the obtained values were grouped by soil types, resulting average values for the main forest soils from Romania. A soil area weighted average value of 137 t/ha is calculated for Romania, in the range of estimations for other European geographic and climatic areas. The soils that have the largest amount of organic carbon are andosols, vertisols, entic and haplic podzols, whereas the ones that have the smallest values of organic carbon are solonetz and solonchaks. Although current assessment relies on very large number of samples from the forest management planning database, the variability of C concentration remains very large, ~40-50% for coefficient the variation and ~100% of the average, when defining the range of 95% of entire soil population, rather showing the variability than uncertainty of the average estimated. Best fit for C concentration on geometric layers in any forest soil is asymmetric, associated with log-normal distributions.