Abstract
Sustained forest management of Cunninghamia lanceolata (Chinese fir) plantations in subtropical China is restricted by the limited availability of quantitative data. This study combines inventory data and tree-ring analysis of Chinese fir from natural and plantation forests that were subjected to controlled burning or brush clearing site preparations. Inter-annual variation of Chinese fir tree-ring widths were measured for the controlled burning, brush clearing and natural forest sites. The mean annual diametric growth of Chinese fir was 0.56 cm·year−1 for the natural forest, 0.80 cm·year−1 for the brush clearing site and 1.10 cm·year−1 for the controlled burning site. The time needed to reach the minimum cutting/logging diameter of 15 cm was 14 years in the controlled burning site, 19 years in the brush clearing site and >40 years in the natural forest. The biological rotation ages for the burning, cutting and natural forest sites were 15, 26 and >100 years, respectively. The total aboveground biomasses for the burning and clearing sites were 269.8 t·ha−1 and 252 t·ha−1, respectively. These results suggest that the current 25-year cutting cycle greatly underestimates the growth rate of Chinese fir plantations.
Highlights
Sustainable forest management is a predominant theme in natural resource management because land managers need to provide current and future generations with the products and services that they desire [1]
Most growth data in tropical forests has been collected in permanent sample plots for fewer than 20 years [5,6,7]
Our results showed that to reach an MCD of 15 cm, the planted Chinese fir trees in the burning and clearing sites required 14 and 19 years, respectively
Summary
Sustainable forest management is a predominant theme in natural resource management because land managers need to provide current and future generations with the products and services that they desire [1]. Successful sustainable forest management requires long-term information on tree growth. Most growth data in tropical forests has been collected in permanent sample plots for fewer than 20 years [5,6,7]. Long-term growth changes have been evaluated using short-term data that may produce biased conclusions [5,8]. As a tool for sustainable forest management, tree-ring data have been widely employed to obtain and study the growth pattern, release and suppression of trees in temperate and tropical forests [9,10,11,12,13,14]
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