How ecological restoration alters ecosystem services: an analysis of carbon sequestration in China's Loess Plateau

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Abstract

Restoring disturbed and over-exploited ecosystems is important to mitigate human pressures on natural ecosystems. China has launched an ambitious national ecosystem restoration program called Grain to Green Program (GTGP) over the last decade. By using remote sensing techniques and ecosystem modelling, we quantitatively evaluated the changes in ecosystem carbon sequestration since China's GTGP program during period of 2000–2008. It was found the NPP and NEP in this region had steadily increased after the initiative of the GTGP program, and a total of 96.1 Tg of additional carbon had been sequestered during that period. Changes in soil carbon storage were lagged behind and thus insignificant over the period, but was expected to follow in the coming decades. As a result, the Loess Plateau ecosystem had shifted from a net carbon source in 2000 to a net carbon sink in 2008. The carbon sequestration efficiency was constrained by precipitation, and appropriate choices of restoration types (trees, shrubs, and grasses) in accordance to local climate are critical for achieving the best benefit/cost efficiency.

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The interdependence of mechanisms underlying climate-driven vegetation mortality.

Nate McDowell, David J. Beerling, David Breshears … (2011)

Climate-driven vegetation mortality is occurring globally and is predicted to increase in the near future. The expected climate feedbacks of regional-scale mortality events have intensified the need to improve the simple mortality algorithms used for future predictions, but uncertainty regarding mortality processes precludes mechanistic modeling. By integrating new evidence from a wide range of fields, we conclude that hydraulic function and carbohydrate and defense metabolism have numerous potential failure points, and that these processes are strongly interdependent, both with each other and with destructive pathogen and insect populations. Crucially, most of these mechanisms and their interdependencies are likely to become amplified under a warmer, drier climate. Here, we outline the observations and experiments needed to test this interdependence and to improve simulations of this emergent global phenomenon. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Drought sensitivity shapes species distribution patterns in tropical forests.

Bettina Engelbrecht, Liza S Comita, Richard Condit … (2007)

Although patterns of tree species distributions along environmental gradients have been amply documented in tropical forests, mechanisms causing these patterns are seldom known. Efforts to evaluate proposed mechanisms have been hampered by a lack of comparative data on species' reactions to relevant axes of environmental variation. Here we show that differential drought sensitivity shapes plant distributions in tropical forests at both regional and local scales. Our analyses are based on experimental field assessments of drought sensitivity of 48 species of trees and shrubs, and on their local and regional distributions within a network of 122 inventory sites spanning a rainfall gradient across the Isthmus of Panama. Our results suggest that niche differentiation with respect to soil water availability is a direct determinant of both local- and regional-scale distributions of tropical trees. Changes in soil moisture availability caused by global climate change and forest fragmentation are therefore likely to alter tropical species distributions, community composition and diversity.

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The carbon balance of terrestrial ecosystems in China.

Shilong Piao, Jingyun Fang, Philippe Ciais … (2009)

Global terrestrial ecosystems absorbed carbon at a rate of 1-4 Pg yr(-1) during the 1980s and 1990s, offsetting 10-60 per cent of the fossil-fuel emissions. The regional patterns and causes of terrestrial carbon sources and sinks, however, remain uncertain. With increasing scientific and political interest in regional aspects of the global carbon cycle, there is a strong impetus to better understand the carbon balance of China. This is not only because China is the world's most populous country and the largest emitter of fossil-fuel CO(2) into the atmosphere, but also because it has experienced regionally distinct land-use histories and climate trends, which together control the carbon budget of its ecosystems. Here we analyse the current terrestrial carbon balance of China and its driving mechanisms during the 1980s and 1990s using three different methods: biomass and soil carbon inventories extrapolated by satellite greenness measurements, ecosystem models and atmospheric inversions. The three methods produce similar estimates of a net carbon sink in the range of 0.19-0.26 Pg carbon (PgC) per year, which is smaller than that in the conterminous United States but comparable to that in geographic Europe. We find that northeast China is a net source of CO(2) to the atmosphere owing to overharvesting and degradation of forests. By contrast, southern China accounts for more than 65 per cent of the carbon sink, which can be attributed to regional climate change, large-scale plantation programmes active since the 1980s and shrub recovery. Shrub recovery is identified as the most uncertain factor contributing to the carbon sink. Our data and model results together indicate that China's terrestrial ecosystems absorbed 28-37 per cent of its cumulated fossil carbon emissions during the 1980s and 1990s.

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Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Sci Rep

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Sci Rep

Title: Scientific Reports

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group

ISSN (Electronic): 2045-2322

Publication date (Electronic): 03 October 2013

Publication date Collection: 2013

Volume: 3

Electronic Location Identifier: 2846

Affiliations

[1 ]State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences , Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China

[2 ]Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth , Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China

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[a ] bfu@ 123456rcees.ac.cn

Article

Publisher Item ID: srep02846

DOI: 10.1038/srep02846

PMC ID: 3789145

PubMed ID: 24088871

SO-VID: ec51ea13-eacb-4200-8ae0-5f257a5f8f79

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

How ecological restoration alters ecosystem services: an analysis of carbon sequestration in China's Loess Plateau

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Hearing Loss and Restoration

Most cited references 5

The interdependence of mechanisms underlying climate-driven vegetation mortality.

Drought sensitivity shapes species distribution patterns in tropical forests.

The carbon balance of terrestrial ecosystems in China.

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