Forest management in southern China generates short term extensive carbon sequestration

Abstract

Land use policies have turned southern China into one of the most intensively managed forest regions in the world, with actions maximizing forest cover on soils with marginal agricultural potential while concurrently increasing livelihoods and mitigating climate change. Based on satellite observations, here we show that diverse land use changes in southern China have increased standing aboveground carbon stocks by 0.11 ± 0.05 Pg C y −1 during 2002-2017. Most of this regional carbon sink was contributed by newly established forests (32%), while forests already existing contributed 24%. Forest growth in harvested forest areas contributed 16% and non-forest areas contributed 28% to the carbon sink, while timber harvest was tripled. Soil moisture declined significantly in 8% of the area. We demonstrate that land management in southern China has been removing an amount of carbon equivalent to 33% of regional fossil CO 2 emissions during the last 6 years, but forest growth saturation, land competition for food production and soil-water depletion challenge the longevity of this carbon sink service.

Responses of Seasonal Indicators to Extreme Droughts in Southwest China

“…The other part of increased PWA came from SWA, which is related to many reasons, such as the fluctuated rainfall, temperature due to climate change and other aspects [77,78]. Moreover, similar to the PWA increased during 2000~2017, our study found that the greenness and carbon cycle also increased in this region, this is identical to the recent studies, in which the SWC is greening and carbon stocks is raising [79,80].…”

Exploring the trade-offs between electric heating policy and carbon mitigation in China

“…6; Φ RG and Φ TL are the sets of renewable generators and interchange tie-lines, respectively. Constraint (9) shows the spinning reserve requirement, where P CG i;max is the installed capacity of the i th coal-fired generator, and R(t) is the reserve requirement at time slot t. Constraint (10) shows the lower and upper limits for coal-fired generators' power, where P CG i;min is the minimal power when the i th coal-fired generator is online. Constraints (11) and (12) show the relationships between U i (t), Y i (t), and Z i (t).…”

Co-Evolution of Emerging Multi-Cities: Rates, Patterns and Driving Policies Revealed by Continuous Change Detection and Classification of Landsat Data

“…An efficient and stable remote sensing data processing method could integrate a volume of images, which would be meaningful in monitoring the urbanization process and analyzing the co-evolution of multi-cities [41][42][43]. Several methods have been developed in recent years to take advantages of time series of remotely sensed images for LULC detection, including the Landsat-based detection of Trends in Disturbance and Recover (LandTrendr) [44,45], the vegetation change tracker (VCT) [46], and the Continuous Change Detection and Classification (CCDC) algorithm [17,33,[47][48][49][50]. These methods are designed to analyze the changes of ground objects through different mechanisms.…”

“…These methods are designed to analyze the changes of ground objects through different mechanisms. LandTrendr detects abrupt change by the segmentation method and, between the abrupt changes, a slope is fitted for each segment to capture the gradual changes, and this approach has been used for insect infestation detection and forest change detection [44,47,51,52]. The VCT normalizes each Landsat image into a forest probability index and uses a thresholding method to detect forest disturbance.…”