text: The financial support for this research was provided by Government of Norway through the two projects entitled “Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation (CCIAM) in Tanzania” and “Enhancing the Measuring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) of forests in Tanzania through the application of advanced remote sensing techniques”. We are highly acknowledging our field team in Tanzania, and Terratec Norway, for collecting and processing of the ALS data. We are also grateful to the administration of ANR for all support, and especially for provision of office space for establishment of the GPS base station.
  Department of Forest Mensuration and Management, Sokoine University of Agriculture, P.O. Box 3013, Morogoro, ᅟ, Tanzania
  All the authors have made substantial contribution towards successful completion of this manuscript. Authors; EWM and OMB have been involved in designing the study, drafting the manuscript, data analysis and write up. EHH has been involved in data analysis and quality control of both raw data and results. EN and TG have been responsible for designing the ALS acquisition and they were involved in revising the manuscript. REM was involved in critical discussion on the field inventory design and all logistics related to the field data acquisition. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
  EWM and EHH are PhD students in forest inventory at Norwegian university of Life Sciences (NBMU).They are both associated with the forest mensuration group in the university. OMB is the researcher in the same group specialized on the application of ALS in forestry. EN and TG are senior scientists and professors in ALS and forest sampling at NMBU. Both EN and TG, are resource persons for the forest mensuration group at NMBU. REM is professor in forest inventory and mensuration at Sokoine university of Agriculture, Tanzania.
  
  A methodological framework to assess the carbon balance of tropical managed forests | Carbon Balance and Management | Full Text
  Managed forests are a major component of tropical landscapes. Production forests as designated by national forest services cover up to 400 million ha, i.e. half of the forested area in the humid tropics. Forest management thus plays a major role in the global carbon budget, but with a lack of unified method to estimate carbon fluxes from tropical managed forests. In this study we propose a new time- and spatially-explicit methodology to estimate the above-ground carbon budget of selective logging at regional scale.
  The yearly balance of a logging unit, i.e. the elementary management unit of a forest estate, is modelled by aggregating three sub-models encompassing (i) emissions from extracted wood, (ii) emissions from logging damage and deforested areas and (iii) carbon storage from post-logging recovery. Models are parametrised and uncertainties are propagated through a MCMC algorithm. As a case study, we used 38 years of National Forest Inventories in French Guiana, northeastern Amazonia, to estimate the above-ground carbon balance (i.e. the net carbon exchange with the atmosphere) of selectively logged forests. Over this period, the net carbon balance of selective logging in the French Guianan Permanent Forest Estate is estimated to be comprised between 0.12 and 1.33 Tg C, with a median value of 0.64 Tg C. Uncertainties over the model could be diminished by improving the accuracy of both logging damage and large woody necromass decay submodels.
  We propose an innovating carbon accounting framework relying upon basic logging statistics. This flexible tool allows carbon budget of tropical managed forests to be estimated in a wide range of tropical regions.
  There is a growing interest of the international community in tropical forests and their key role in the global carbon cycle. In particular, tropical managed forests, i.e. tropical forests managed for timber production, are important in the context of climate change mitigation as they might either act as carbon source or sink, depending on their management type and cutting cycle length [1]. With half of tropical humid forests, i.e. more than 400 million ha, designated by National Forest Services (NFS) as production forests [2], forest management will play a decisive role in future global carbon cycle. However, while there is extensive scientific literature on undisturbed tropical forests, our knowledge on carbon balance (i.e. the net carbon exchange with the atmosphere) in managed forests remains to be improved. With international programs like REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) aiming at mitigating carbon emissions, notably through improved forest management, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the carbon balance of tropical managed forests in order to develop unified accounting methods for carbon emissions.