Biomass Production and Carbon Mitigation Potential of Different Shrubs in Urban Landscaping

摘要

Anthropogenic emission of carbon dioxide (CO^) led to global warming and climate change affecting the biodiversity and destabilizing food and livelihood security (Malhi and Grace, 2000). Global warming risks have increased the need for the identification of ecosystems with high carbon sink capacity as an alternative mitigation strategy of terrestrial carbon sequestration (Kumar et al., 2009). Shrub species play an important role on carbon sequestration in forest and grassland ecosystems. For example,in temperate and subtropical areas, the encroachment of woody species Into herbaceous ecosystems has been reported to increase ecosystem carbon sequestration and soil organic carbon probably due to the high productivity (Archer et al., 2001; Brantley and Young, 2010). The biomass of herbs, shrubs, and trees is an important ecosystem attribute for herbivores, their subsequent predators and for ecosystem management as well. For individual trees or forest stands, information on biomass is essential for understanding the changes In energy, carbon, and nutrient flows resulting from changes in forest land use (Brown 1997; Marland etal., 1997; Schimel et al., 2000). Shrub biomass is an important component of the total forest biomass, especially in natural stands. However, compared with arboreal biomass, shrub biomass is often neglected in biomass research because of the lack of methodology and difficulty in calculation. Some research has gone into estimating the biomass of individual shrub species (Paton etal., 2002) but due to lack of reliable shrub data on standing biomass, the net carbon emission estimates for India are highly variable (Ravindernath et al., 1997). Carbon dioxide is captured and stored naturally by the plants through the process of photosynthesis, hence, estimation of this carbon content in vegetation becomes imperative to access the carbon mitigation potential. Considering the thrust area, present investigation was undertaken to quantify the carbon storage in the shrub biomass.