Carbon Accumulation in Three Types of Forests in the Ecuadorian Amazon Region Province of Napo Soil Component

General objective To quantify the ecosystem service of carbon storage in three types of ecosystems, lowland evergreen forest, foothill evergreen forest, and low montane Andean evergreen forest in Napo province. Justification The purpose of the proposal is to estimate the amount of biomass and carbon stored in the aerial and surface components, the soils and the underground biomass of 3 types of forests, differentiated according to altitude, topography, structure and floristic composition; following the methodology established by the MAE (MAE, FAO 2012.; MAE, FAO 2015.). The amount of biomass will be determined both above and below ground in permanent plots, in coordination with those responsible for the Second National Forest Inventory, in the following three types of forest: 1) Lowland Evergreen Forest, 2) Evergreen Forest foothills, and 3) low montane Andean evergreen forest, ecosystems of great importance in the RAE. The study includes the forest inventory with the purpose of knowing the floristic biodiversity and measuring the dasometric variables such as: stem and total height, height and crown shape and dbh; In addition, ecological indices will be determined, including the importance value index (IVI) of forest species. Based on the IVI, the 10 species with the highest values ​​will be selected to, through the low-impact destructive method, determine the amount of biomass stored in said species. With this, allometric equations will be generated for each forest species under study. Then the total biomass for each plot will be estimated and in this way the amount of biomass for each ecosystem will be inferred. Finally, based on allometric equations generated by other researchers in humid tropical forests, the amount of carbon fixed above and below ground will be estimated, and the amount of carbon fixed by each type of forest will be calculated (MAE, FAO 2015).