Management intensification maintains wood production over multiple harvests in tropical Eucalyptus plantations

Abstract

Plantation forestry, in which trees are grown as a crop, must maintain wood production over repeated harvest cycles (rotations) to meet global wood demands on a limited land area. We analyze 33 yr of Landsat observations across the world's most productive forestry system, Eucalyptus plantations in southeastern Brazil, to assess long‐term regional trends in wood production. We apply a simple algorithm to time series of the vegetation index NIRv in thousands of Eucalyptus stands to detect the starts and ends of rotations. We then estimate wood production in each identified stand and rotation, based on a statistical relationship between NIRv trajectories and inventory data from three plantation companies. We also compare Eucalyptus NIRv with that of surrounding native vegetation to assess the relative influence of management and environment on plantation productivity trends. Across more than 3,500 stands with three complete rotations between 1984 and 2016, modeled wood volume decreased significantly between the first and second rotation, but recovered at least partially in the third; mean wood volumes for the three rotations were 262, 228, and 247 m3/ha. This nonlinear trend reflects intensifying plantation management, as rotation length decreased by an average of 15% (decreasing wood volume per rotation) and NIRv proxies of tree growth rates increased (increasing volume) between the first and third rotation. However, NIRv also increased significantly over time in unmanaged vegetation around the plantations, suggesting that environmental trends affecting all vegetation also contribute to sustaining wood production. Management inputs will likely continue to be important for maintaining wood production in future harvests.

Sustainability tensions and opportunities for aviation biofuel production in Brazil

“…The analysis takes as reference the conclusions from Mawhood et al (2016) [3], and it is complemented with more recent information about the considered technologies [31,48,49]. For feedstock biomass, the FRL scale from the Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative was used as a benchmark [50], taking recent literature into account [51][52][53][54]. Then, a positive score was considered for feedstock biomass that already reached a full-scale commercial deployment, a neutral effect for feedstock biomass in precommercial testing, and a negative one for feedstock biomass at the preliminary evaluation stage.…”

“…For feedstock biomass, investment security was explored in terms of supply certainty and the familiarity of farmers with the crops [13]. Sugarcane and eucalypt, despite not being originally from Brazil, are well established crops in the region, covering developed markets such as sugar, ethanol, charcoal, and wood [51,52], and implying a Fig. 3 Qualitative comparison of the performance of the aviation biofuel production alternatives presented per production chain.…”

Insights into Canopy Escape Ratio from Canopy Structures: Correlations Uncovered through Sentinel-2 and Field Observation

“…Numerous studies have demonstrated that such a robust correlation [4,5] can substantially improve GPP estimation using NIRv and its derivatives, such as NIRvP [6,7]. The simplicity and intuitiveness of NIRv have led to its application in various forms of vegetation research, such as GPP estimation [5,8], long-term trend analysis [9,10], and climate-vegetation interactions [4,11].…”

Individual Tree Detection in a Eucalyptus Plantation Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-LiDAR

“…It is planted to produce pulp, biofuel [9], or timber products such as particle board, veneer, or engineered flooring [37]. Eucalyptus plantations account for circa 20 million hectares across six continents in tropical, subtropical, and temperate regions [39]. In 2010, Crecente-Campo et al [40] stated that the lack of management tools for eucalypt stands implied a lack of proper management [41].…”