Abstract
Establishing reliable carbon baselines for landowners desiring to sustain carbon sequestration and identify opportunities to mitigate land management impacts on carbon balance is important; however, national and regional assessments are not designed to support individual landowners. Such baselines become increasingly valuable when landowners convert land use, change management, or when disturbance occurs. We used forest inventories to quantify carbon stocks, estimate annual carbon fluxes, and determine net biome production (NBP) over a 50-year period coinciding with a massive afforestation effort across ~80,000 ha of land in the South Carolina Coastal Plain. Forested land increased from 48,714 ha to 73,824 ha between 1951 and 2001. Total forest biomass increased from 1.73–3.03 Gg to 17.8–18.3 Gg, corresponding to biomass density increases from 35.6–62.2 Mg ha−1 to 231.4–240.0 Mg ha−1. Harvesting removed 1340.3 Gg C between 1955 and 2001, but annual removals were variable. Fire consumed 527.1 Gg C between 1952 and 2001. Carbon exported by streams was <0.5% of total export. Carbon from roots and other harvested material that remained in-use or in landfills comprised 49.3% of total harvested carbon. Mineral soil carbon accounted for 41.6 to 50% of 2001 carbon stocks when considering depths of 1.0 or 1.5 m, respectively, and was disproportionately concentrated in wetlands. Moreover, we identified a soil carbon deficit of 19–20 Mg C ha−1, suggesting opportunities for future soil carbon sequestration in post-agricultural soils. Our results provide a robust baseline for this site that can be used to understand how land conversion, forest management, and disturbance impacts carbon balance of this landscape and highlight the value of these baseline data for other sites. Our work also identifies the need to manage forests for multiple purposes, especially promotion of soil carbon accumulation in low-density pine savannas that are managed for red-cockaded woodpeckers and therefore demand low aboveground carbon stocks.
Highlights
The southeastern USA is an important region for assessing temporal dynamics of carbon (C)stocks in response to both management and natural processes
We developed a separate procedure to estimate the mass aboveground tree biomass and C stocks in 2001 using Methods A and B
A generated lower values than Method B for the same amount of growing stock in 1951; when these two methods were applied to the 2001-inventory, we found similar values of
Summary
The southeastern USA is an important region for assessing temporal dynamics of carbon (C)stocks in response to both management and natural processes. Forests 2019, 10, 760 forest cover has increased dramatically since the 1950s because the environmental conditions are poor for large-scale production of many crops with the exception of hay and pasture, in the upper coastal plain sub-region. Forest cover of this region is comprised of various pine and hardwood species, with a wide range of forest management overlain on past land conversions. Short rotation woody crops are being evaluated for bioenergy and pulp production [8,9,10] These initiatives are only constrained by market conditions, and air and water quality regulations. Establishing a reliable C baseline for individual landowners (e.g., federal and state governments, timber companies, NGOs, and private landowners) who desire to sustain the
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