Lateral Accounting of Transport in Terrestrial Ecosystems

LATTE (Lateral Accounting of Transport in Terrestrial Ecosystems) is a high-resolution (5 arc-minute) global gridded dataset of annual land–atmosphere CO₂ fluxes attributable to lateral carbon transfers. LATTE quantifies paired CO₂ sinks at production locations and compensatory CO₂ sources at receptor locations, for three major mechanisms: crop harvest, trade, and consumption; industrial roundwood harvest, trade, and harvested wood product pools with country-specific decay and delayed emissions; and the inland water carbon loop, including soil-to-river leaching, river and lake CO₂ evasion, aquatic burial, and export to the ocean. National production and trade statistics and biofuel energy balances are converted to carbon units and downscaled using satellite NPP, forest carbon removal maps, population density, livestock distributions, and gridded biofuel combustion proxies. Inland water fluxes are based on published climatologies with basin-scale mass balancing across major river basins.