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and other features. This map shows today’s best available
map of the terrestrial distribution of carbon. It combines a
globally consistent dataset of carbon stored in live biomass
(Ruesch and Gibbs 2008) with a dataset on soil carbon to
1 m depth (IGBP-DIS 2000, this is likely to underestimate
carbon stored in peat soils). It shows that the largest amounts
of carbon are stored in the tropics, mostly as biomass, and
in high latitude ecosystems where the stocks are largely lo-
cated in permanently frozen layers of soil (permafrost) and
in peat.