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Centre Île-de-France - Versailles-Grignon den Herder M1, Lawson G2, Deranja D3, Kay S4, Bertomeu Garcia M5, Machine A6, Rønn-Andersen K7, Gosme M8, Nevalainen M1, Palma J9, Tomás A9 1European Forest Institute, Joensuu, Finland, 2European Agroforestry Federation, Montpellier, France, 3Planet Labs, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 4Agroscope, Zurich, Switzerland, 5University of Extremadura, Plasencia, Spain, 6University of Leicester, United Kingdom, 7Regen Farmer, Odense, Denmark, 8INRAE, Montpellier, France, 9MVARC, Mértola, Portugal Estimating agroforestry area and greenhouse gas mitigation potential in Europe Introduction Reliable estimates of the extent of agroforestry are important to help design national land use policies. Particularly in the context of the EU Deforestation Regulation agroforestry land must be clearly distinguished from forest land. A first attempt to estimate the global area of agroforestry was made by Zomer et al. (2009)1who suggested that agroforestry covers about 46%(>10% tree cover) of the agricultural land globally. For Europe, they estimated an impressive 40% (91 million ha) of agricultural land covered by agroforestry. Later studies, using a pan-European database called LUCAS (Land Use and Land Cover Data)2, derived a wide range of estimates ranging from 11.4 Mha3to 15.4 Mha4to 20.3 Mha5or even 40.8 Mha6. Methods using LUCAS in Europe therefore have accuracy and methodological issues7, which can best be resolved by open access national farming statistics8. Agroforestry has significant climate change mitigation potential because it stores carbon in biomass and soil. Of all man-made systems which also contribute to food production, agroforestry stores the highest amounts of carbon9,10,11. Temperate agroforestry systems store less carbon compared to tropical systems, but as a large part of Europe is covered by agriculture (about 40%of the total land area), giving a large potential for additional carbon storage. The DigitAF project is exploring different methods to estimate the extent of agroforestry and Trees outside the Forest. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. Grant agreement: 101059794 References 1Zomer et al. 2009. Trees on Farms. ICRAF Working Paper no.89.2Eurostat, 2015. LUCAS Land Use and Land Cover Survey. Eurostat Statistics explained, available online at: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/LUCAS__Land_use_and_land_cover_survey.3Rubio-Delgado, J. et al. 2023. Front. Environ. Sci. 11.4den Herder, M. et al. 2017. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 241, 121–132. 5Plieninger, T. et al., 2015. Biological conservation, 190,70–79.6Rubio-Delgado, J. et al. 2025. Agricultural Systems 229. 7Machine, A. et al. 2025. Environ. Res. Lett. 20.8Lawson et al. 2025. Availability and use of IACS geospatial data in the EU (Version v1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15712678. 9Kumar, B.M., Nair, P.K.R. (Eds.). 2011. Carbon Sequestration Potential of Agroforestry Systems: Opportunities and Challenges, Advances in Agroforestry. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht. 10Toensmeier, E. 2016. The Carbon Farming Solution: A Global Toolkit of Perennial Crops and Regenerative Agriculture Practices for Climate Change Mitigation and Food Security. Chelsea Green Publishing. 11Nair, P.K.R., Kumar, B.M., Nair, V.D. 2021. An Introduction to Agroforestry: Four Decades of Scientific Developments. Springer International Publishing. 12Lawson, G. et al. 2025. Chapter 10 - Agroforestry and net-zero in the European agriculture, forestry and land use sector, in: Sandeep Kumar, Ram Swaroop Meena, Agriculture Toward Net Zero Emissions, Academic Press. 13Lawson, G.J. et al., 2023. Agroforestry and the 2040 AFOLU net-zero target, European Agroforestry Federation. Available at: https://zenodo.org/records/8075187 The DigitAF project has mapped tree cover in agricultural land. Currently there are 108.9 million hectares of agricultural land (59%of the agricultural area) without any trees. There is much to be done to improve this estimate at EU level, and DigitAF intends to replace the 100m Copernicus Tree Cover Density product with the 10m version and to use LPIS data rather than Corine. An "integrated rural land-parcel-registry" would greatly facilitate this move to land-diversity mapping and potential CAP "payment by results" schemes. Figure 1. Tree cover density (% tree cover in 100 m pixels) in cropland/grassland in the 39 EEA countries12. The deep red areas are priority planting areas where tree cover density is particularly low. They are usually on mineral soils where agroforestry will make the greatest contribution to carbon sequestration. Copernicus tree cover density 2018 superimposed on CORINE agricultural land 2018. Each pixel in this map covers 1ha. Table 1. Zero-tree-index ranking of EU Member States (i.e. % agricultural hectares with zero trees)13 MT CY RO LT BG HU EL NL SK HR CZ PL ES DK IT BE EE LU DE FR AT LV FI IE SI SE PT Zero-tree index 95 88 82 82 79 78 76 75 71 71 71 70 70 70 67 65 65 65 64 62 62 62 60 59 54 49 48 #12345678910 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 The Land Parcel Identification System gives access to public agricultural administrative units, crop and land-use codes and parcel geometries for several EU Member States, but in different formats. The LPIS integrator homogenizes this data and allows panEuropean query and viewing. A harmonized and better accessible LPIS registry could form the foundational basis for estimating agroforestry area and a "geospatial carbon removals registry“. www.digitaf.eu Scan to download this poster from Zenodo!
