Fundecitrus and Embrapa Territorial carried out a joint scientific research project to quantify carbon stocks and identify wildlife in Brazil’s Citrus Belt of São Paulo and Triângulo/Southwest Minas Gerais. The work, supported by resources from Innocent Drinks, resulted in the publishing of an article titled “Estimating biomass and carbon stock in orange trees (Citrus sinensis L. Osbeck) of the São Paulo and southwestern Minas Gerais citrus belt, Brazil.”
The following organization’s researchers produced the publication:
- Embrapa Territorial – Lauro Rodrigues Nogueira Jr., Carlos Cesar Ronquim and Fernando Antônio de Pádua Paim
- The Crop Estimation Research Department of Sao Paulo State University – José Carlos Barbosa
- Fundecitrus – Vinícius Gustavo Trombin, Roseli Reina and Fernando Alvarinho Delgado
The article highlights how the living biomass and carbon stock in citrus orchards are receiving increasing attention due to their role in the carbon balance of citrus production and in mitigating climate change.
To carry out the work, orange trees were analyzed to develop allometric equations to estimate the carbon stock of living biomass in citrus groves. Above- and below-ground living biomass and biometric variables were directly measured for 80 harvested orange trees. This included Pera and Valencia varieties and four age classes (3 to 5, 6 to 10, 11 to 15 and more than 15 years) of trees.
It was concluded that 8.4 million megagrams of carbon are stored in approximately 162 million orange trees in the largest orange juice-producing region in the world.
This work demonstrates, for the first time, that orange tree biomass can be estimated by allometric equations. In addition, estimating how much carbon an orange grove stores in its living biomass becomes increasingly important to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Read the full research article here.
Source: Fundecitrus
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