Abstract:

The tradeoffs and optimizations of ecosystem services are the key research fields of ecology and geography. As the most important and complex ecosystem in terrestrial ecosystems, forest ecosystem plays a very important part in the biogeochemical cycle which include terrestrial carbon cycle and water cycle, and also provides numerous ecosystem services that are crucial to human wellbeing. China has the largest plantation area worldwide. Under the background of global warming, there are more and more concerns on timber production and carbon storage of plantations, nevertheless, they have a relationship of restricting each other. Thus, it is necessary to maximize the overall benefit of timber production and carbon storage for forest ecological development in China. We selected the Huitong National Research Station of Forest Ecosystem as our study area, and used permanent sample plot data of plantations and InVEST model to evaluate timber production and carbon storage quantitatively. Then, we constructed a conceptual framework of forest ecosystem service tradeoffs under different management regimes. Lastly, tradeoffs countermeasures for optimizing overall benefits of ecosystem services were put forward. The results showed that: (1) When timber production increased with harvesting intensity over the entire 100 year planning horizon, carbon storage decreased. There were tradeoffs between timber production and carbon storage according to the significant negative relationship. (2) When the overall benefits of timber production and carbon storage increased with harvesting intensity, the value of tradeoffs decreased. T1 and T2 scenarios, with harvesting intensity of 10%-20% every 10 years, were the optimum management regime for timber production and carbon storage to gain more benefits and less tradeoffs. (3) The current harvesting intensity in Huitong County was slightly higher than the optimum harvesting intensity. On practical dimension, these findings suggested that obvious objectives are needed to formulate the corresponding countermeasures of tradeoffs, in order to realize the improvement of ecosystem services and the optimization of ecosystem structures.

Key words: timber production, carbon storage, plantation, tradeoff analysis, Huitong eco-station