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) who 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 (10% tree cover). Later studies, using a pan-European database called LUCAS (Land Use and Land Cover Data), derived a wide range of estimates ranging from 11.4 Mha to 15.4 Mha to 20.3 Mha or even 40.8 Mha. Methods using LUCAS in Europe therefore have accuracy and methodological issues, which can best be resolved by open access national farming statistics.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 carbon. 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. 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.
