Non-production vegetation plays an increasingly important role in enhancing ecological services in areas with intensive agricultural land use. Integrating non-production vegetation into agricultural landscapes in the form of hedgerows and riparian buffers has been shown to improve surrounding biodiversity, water quality, and soil quality. However, the magnitude and change dynamics of these services, which depends on the characteristics and placement of individual hedgerows and riparian buffers, is not well understood at the landscape scale. Our goal was to identify key characteristics of hedgerows and riparian buffers impacting ecosystem service provisioning, in terms of above and below-ground carbon storage, and to improve methods for detection and evaluation. The study was conducted across the agricultural land of the Lower Fraser Valley region of British Columbia. Our approach combined field measurements, RapidEye remote sensing imagery analysis, and computer modeling to map above and below-ground carbon for hedgerows and riparian buffers in our study area.
Results/Conclusions
Sampled hedgerows and riparian buffers ranged in soil texture, age, dimensions, neighboring land use, species composition, and vegetation structure. Above-ground carbon stocks ranged from 23.7 to 196.2 Mg C / ha in hedgerows and 14.7 to 377.6 Mg C / ha in riparian buffers. A strong correlation between above-ground carbon and measured soil organic carbon improved landscape level modeling of above and below-ground carbon. The results of this study have important implications for hedgerow and riparian buffer design as a means of increasing total carbon stocks on agricultural landscapes. Next steps will involve using these maps to monitor changes in above and below-ground hedgerow and riparian buffer carbon, to model changes in additional ecosystem services and to prioritize future plantings.