The Development and Evaluation of a High-Resolution Above Ground Biomass Product for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (2000)

This study details the development of a U. S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico above-ground forest biomass ( AGB ) product (baseline 2000) developed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency ( EPA ) that was compared to another AGB product developed by the U. S. Forest Service ( USFS ) for the same area. The USEPA product tended to over-predict in areas of low biomass and under-predict in high biomass areas when compared to observed plot data, but compared favorably to a Forest Inventory Analysis ( FIA ) assessment of structure and condition of Puerto Rico forests (72.6 Mg/ha versus 80.0 Mg/ ha, respectively). AGB estimates were highly correlated with reference FIA biomass for both maps at their native spatial resolutions ( USEPA : r =0.93, USFS : r = 0.92). AGB mean difference between both products was 33.5 Mg/ha ( USFS mean = 106.1 Mg/ha; USEPA mean = 72.6 Mg/ha), a difference not out-of-scope when compared to other biomass comparative studies.