The Australian Plant Biomass Library

The Australian Biomass Plot Library is a collation of stem inventory data across federal, state and local government departments, universities, private companies and other agencies. It was motivated to the need for calibration/validation data to underpin national mapping of above-ground biomass from integration of Landsat time-series, ICESat/GLAS lidar, and ALOS PALSAR backscatter data under the auspices of the JAXA Kyoto & Carbon (K&C) Initiative (Armston et al., 2016). At the time of Version 1.0 publication 1,073,837 hugs of 839,866 trees across 1,467 species had been collated. This has resulted from 16,391 visits to 12,663 sites across most of Australia's bioregions. Data provided for each project by the various source organisation were imported to a PostGIS database in their native form and then translated to a common set of tree, plot and site level observations with explicit plot footprints where available. The above-ground, below-ground and total biomass (live+dead) estimation was implemented using the generic allometric models for Australian plant functional types developed by Paul et al. (2016a,b) and decay correction factors implemented by Lucas et al. (2010). Site level estimates of biomass error were derived through comprehensive analysis of measurement and allometric model prediction errors (Roxburgh & Paul, 2016), propagating the random error (precision) associated with the development of the allometric models, all the way through to the prediction of total site biomass (Figure 3). In total eight sources of error are included, with four of these relating to errors encountered during allometric model development, with additional errors arising from diameter measurements during field inventory, allometric model prediction errors, and plot sampling and areal extent errors during field inventory. The tree level error propagation and biomass predictions were undertaken using the Carbon Analysis Tool (CAT), a software system developed by CSIRO for the Department of the Environment in support of vegetation-based greenhouse-gas mitigation activities under the Emissions Reduction Fund