GEF Innovative Forest Management Plan—Taking Grassland Forest Farm in Fengning County as an Example

Abstract

Currently, China’s forest ecosystem focus is shifting from a single management objective to multiple management objectives, aiming to improve forest quality and maximize the benefits of ecosystem services. Many difficulties and problems are encountered in the long-term development of most northern state-owned forest farms—for example, the fragmentation and degradation of forest landscapes caused by poor forest management and extensive land use—resulting in an ecosystem that is unable to provide optimal services. This research was conducted on the Fengning Grassland Forest Farm, which is based on the GEF project of state-owned forest farms. We applied lessons from international advanced concepts, such as landscape restoration, and combinecombined all types of existing data and supplementary survey data on forest farms. In addition, we used multivariate statistical analysis and geostatistical analysis methods to optimize spatial layout and forest landscape structure. Strategies of landscape restoration and optimization, forest quality improvement, and grassland ecological restoration were proposed. A forest growth model was established to predict the annual growth of forests, calculate sustainable levels of annual cutting, calculate biomass and carbon sequestration in the management period, and evaluate the value of the ecological service functions of forest ecosystems in forest farms. Finally, a set of forest management methods was developed to effectively improve the sustainable management level of state-owned forest farms and enhance the service function of forest ecosystems.