Updated estimation of forest biomass carbon pools in China, 1977–2018

[摘要] China is one of the major forest countries in the world,and the accurate estimation of its forest biomass carbon (C) pool iscritical for evaluating the country's C budget and ecosystem services offorests. Although several studies have estimated China's forest biomassusing national forest inventory data, most of them were limited to theperiod of 2004–2008. In this study, we extended our estimation to the mostrecent period of 2014–2018. Using datasets of eight inventory periods from1977 to 2018 and the continuous biomass expansion factor method, weestimated that the total biomass C pool and average biomass C density inChinese forests increased from 4717 Tg C (1 Tg  =  10 12  g) in theperiod of 1977–1981 to 7975 Tg C in the period of 2014–2018 and 38.2 Mg C ha −1 to 45.8 Mg C ha −1 (1 Mg  =  10 6  g), respectively, with anet increase of 3258 Tg C and an annual sink of 88.0 Tg C yr −1 . Overthe most recent 10 years (2009–2018), the average national forest biomass Cdensity and C sink were 44.6 Mg C ha −1 and 154.8 Tg C yr −1 ,respectively, much larger than those of 39.6 Mg C ha −1 and 63.3 Tg C yr −1 in the period 1977–2008. These pronounced increases were largelyattributed to afforestation practices, forest growth, and environmentalchanges. Our results have documented the importance of ecologicalrestoration practices, provided an essential basis for assessing ecosystemservices, and helped to achieve China's C neutrality target.

[学科分类] 大气科学