s:1654:"TI Methods of sampling carbon stocks above and below ground AU Hairiah, D.K. AU Sitompul S M AU Palm C A AU van Noordwijk, M. AB General backgrounds of C stock assessments are discussed in the accompanying lecture note (Hairiah, K., Sitompul, S.M., van Noordwijk M., and Palm, C., 2001. Carbon stocks of tropical land use systems as part of the global C balance: effects of forest conversion and options for ‘clean development’ activities. ASB_Lecture Note 4A), here we focus on methods for fieldwork and give some detail on the use of the Century model. Earlier versions of the ASB protocol for C stock assessment were published by Murdiyarso et al. (1994, 1999). Assessment of C stocks can be aimed at a specific ‘area’, what-ever it’s vegetation or land use, or at a specific ‘activity’ or form of land use or land cover as found within a specified geographic domain. For either approach, the first step is one of ‘stratification’ to obtain a clear, operational definition of the unit of analysis. For the ASB project, we are interested in the measurement of C stocks for a range of land use alternatives in ‘benchmark areas’, of assumed relevance to the broader domains of the (former) lowland tropical rain forest zone. We thus have to get operational definitions of what these land uses look like in various phases of their own production cycle, what variation in management intensity and style is accepted within the term as used, and then select specific sample sites to represent the broader category. We will not describe the details of that site selection process here, as it was discussed in Lecture Note 2. ";