Spatiotemporal Change of Carbon Storage in Forest Biomass: A case Study in Koprulu Canyon National Park

Forest ecosystems, especially protected forest areas play a key role in climate change mitigation. With the declaring Koprulu Canyon as a National Park (NP) since 1973, this region has likely become an important carbon (C) sink. To quantify this potential, understand its implication to the national C budget, comprehend the forest dynamics and evaluate these issues in future park planning, we estimated the changes in forest biomass C storage between 1965 and 2008. Based on the two periods of forest inventory, we used Biomass Expansion Factors (BEFs) to estimate the forest biomass C pool. The quantitative evidences presented here showed that there were drastic changes in C stock in above and below ground forest ecosystem increased nearly by 46% from one period to the other due mainly to the increase of growing stock and quality of forest ecosystem structure. Koprulu Canyon NP has accumulated 3.21 Tg C increasing from 3.56 Tg C in 1965 to 1.98 in 2008, at a rate of 0.28 Gg C yr(-1) ha(-1) between two periods. These certain C stock changes are also reflection of forest dynamics resulting in compatible with temporal changes with a net increase of 530.0 ha (1.84%) of forested areas or stands. On the other hand, such rate of increase in C was not influenced negatively by total number of patches increased from 238 to 672 almost tripled, and the mean patch size of the land cover/land use classes dropped markedly from 1615.0 ha to 425.3 ha. in the same period. In conclusion, landscape dynamics and effects of land use/land cover changes on the amount of C storage are necessary for national park planning.