Support to Renewable Energy Directive

Thematic Data Layers for Commission Decision of [10 June 2010] on guidelines for the calculation of land carbon stocks for the purpose of Annex V to Directive 2009/28/EC

1. Climatic Zone

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The Climatic Zone layer is defined based on the classification of IPCC (IPCC, 2006). The zones are defined by a set of rules based on :

• annual mean daily temperature,
• total annual precipitation,
• total annual potential evapo-transpiration (PET) and
• elevation.

The classification presented as Figure 3A.5.1 Classification scheme for default climate regions” (IPCC, 2006) could not be accessed in electronic form and generated from an independently developed set of base data layers. Climatic information on temperature and precipitation was provided by the 5 arc min. dataset Version 1.4 from the WorldClim project (Hijmans et al., 2005). PET was computed according to the temperature-based formula investigated by Oudin et al. (2005) and used by Kay & Davis (2008). The computation of the extraterrestrial radiation was based on Duffie & Beckman (1991) and Allen et al. (1994). The formulas were supplemented by the information provided by the “Solar Radiation Basis” Web-page of the University of Oregon: http://solardat.uoregon.edu/SolarRadiationBasics.html.

2. Soil Type Classification

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Soil types are classified according to the World Reference Base (WRB). The scheme for translating soil types into IPCC classes is presented “Figure 3A.5.4 Classification scheme for mineral soil types based on World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB) classification” (IPCC, 2006). The layer was generated by applying the IPCC soil classification to the Harmonized World Soil Database (HWSD; http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/luc07/External-World-soil-database/HTML/index.html) (Fisher et al., 2008) from IIASA and FAO.

3. Common Spatial Layer Specifications

The thematic layers are stored in Idrisi file format. The technical specifications of the spatial data layers are given in Table 1.

* Annoni, et al., 2001

Citations

• Carré., F., Hiederer, R., Blujdea, V. and Koeble, R. (2010) Background Guide for the Calculation of Land Carbon Stocks in the Biofuels Sustainability Scheme Drawing on the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories. EUR 24573 EN. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. 109pp.
• Hiederer, R., F. Ramos, C. Capitani, R. Koeble, V. Blujdea, O. Gomez, D. Mulligan and L. Marelli. (2010) Biofuels: a New Methodology to Estimate GHG Emissions from Global Land UseChange. EUR 24483 EN. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. 150pp.