Processing a Soil Organic Carbon C-Stock Baseline under Cropland and Grazing Land Management Data and Processing CO2 emission and removals for IPCC Tier 1 Method

For the years 2013-2020 Decision 529/2013 extended for the Member States of the European Union mandatory accounting for Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and removals to the activities Cropland Management (CM) and Grazing Land Management (GM). For the purpose of accounting GHG emissions and removals from anthropogenic activities and changes in land use the International Panel on Climate Change has specified guidelines which should be applied. The guidelines distinguish three tiers of methods, of which Tier 1 is the most generic. The method uses general default values and national data. For the purpose of accounting land use conversions between categories should be spatially explicit (Approach 3). Spatially explicit data on land use changes should cover a whole country and include all categories, not just areas of CM and GM. In this document the data needed and the processing implemented to compute a baseline for 2010 for estimating CO2 emissions and removals from changes in the soil organic C-stocks according to the Tier 1 method for CM and GM are described. Under Tier 1 a baseline for soil organic C-stocks has to cover at least 20 years of changes in land use, management practice and input level. Data processing therefore covers the period 1990 to 2010 and comprises all Member Starts of the European Union. The method for estimating annual changes in soil organic C-stocks combines statistical data from the Eurostat database with spatial layers from various outer sources. All conditions affecting soil organic C-stocks under Tier 1 are processed as spatial layers in a Geographic Information System. The condition layers are generated using a suitability overlays and a spatial allocation method. The layers are then combined according to the Tier 1 classification schema to provide changes in soil organic C-stocks and thus changes in CO2 emissions and removals from CM and GM. The main challenge in estimating changes in soil organic C-stocks was the availability of data suitable to be included, in particular on management practice and input level. The statistical data were prepared by completing instances of missing data in a time-series, identifying outliers and providing consistency with other data. Where thematic data were missing proxies were used and processed in the spatial domain. The outcome of the statistical and spatial processing activity is a set of spatial data on land use, management practices and input levels for each year of the period 1990 to 2010 to estimate a soil organic C-stock baseline for 2010 for CM and GM.JRC.D.3-Land Resource