Abstract:

Forest ecosystems play important roles in provisioning and regulating services. In China, forest ecosystems have been facing problems such as poor quality, simple structures, and weak ecological functions. Scientific, reasonable, and applicable forest management strategies are concerned with optimizing the structure of forests, achieving sustainable development, and promoting ecological functions while meeting production requirements. Therefore, a coupling path of the ecosystem progress model (PnET-II) and landscape model (LANDIS-II) were used to simulate dynamic changes in the area and aboveground biomass (AGB) of the plantations over the next 100 years, considering from the initial year (2009). The variables of the designed factorial experiment were cut-block size, cutting area ratio, as the initial year cutting age and cutting frequencies. It was found that the cutting age and cut-block size had limited impacts on the forest area, although they affected the levels of AGB. Both the cutting area ratio and cutting frequency, however, had significant impacts on forest area and AGB. Moreover, the cutting area ratio was a crucial variable with the greatest influence on forests among the four variables. The management strategy of a harvest scenario with a 20% cutting area ratio, 5 ha cut-block size and 10-year cutting frequency on 21-year-old Chinese fir, 26-year-old pine and 41-year-old broad-leaved forests provided the optimal results among all the tested scenarios. This ensured that the AGB of the forest remained relatively stable during the simulation. Therefore, it is an effective way to maintain the ecological functions of artificial forests while producing wood.

Key words: forest management, aboveground biomass, landscape pattern, plantations, LANDIS-II, red soil hilly region, artificial forest