Biomass and Carbon Stock Estimation of Udawattakele Forest Reserve in Kandy District of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Carbon dioxide has gained lot of attention in recent past as a greenhouse gas, and therefore it has a potential to affect the climate pattern of the world. Several anthropogenic activities are known to be responsible for the increased level of carbon in the atmosphere and disruption of the global carbon cycle. However, nature has its own mechanism of sequestering and storing the carbon in its “reservoirs”. Forest has the ability to sequester carbon in their biomass and reduce the rate of increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The carbon sequestered in the forest trees are mostly referred to as the biomass of a tree or a forest. It has been identified five carbon pools of the terrestrial ecosystem, involving biomass. The study was designed to estimate biomass stock and then the carbon stock of the Udawattakele Forest Reserve (7°17'58 "N, 80°38'20’’E) in Kandy, Sri Lanka. Allometric equations were used to calculate biomass of trees. The total biomass stock was estimated to be 9475.56 t ha^-1 (Mega gram-Mg) and the total carbon stock was estimated to be 4,453.55 t ha^-1 (Mg) in the Udawattakele Forest Reserve (UFR). This amount is equivalent to 16,344.52 Mg of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. UFR holds a moderate amount of biomass/carbon stock and the total carbon density of natural forest and plantations was found to be 36.55 Mg ha^-1 and 44.89 Mg ha^-1 respectively.