Long-term changes of forest biomass and its driving factors in karst area, Guizhou, China

Abstract

The spatiotemporal dynamic changes of forest biomass can provide scientific reference and scheme for improving the quality of forest resources and the ecological environment in karst areas. In this article, the China’s National Forest Continuous Inventory data (from 1984 to 2015) was used to analyze the dynamic changes of forest biomass with the univariate linear slope k, barycenter trajectory, improved hot spots detection which was applied in the analysis of forest biomass dynamic change, and geospatial detector method in Guizhou in the first time. The results showed that the total forest biomass had a steady upward trend, 29.3% unit biomass of the forest had significantly increased, while 1.4% decreased dramatically. The forest biomass gravity center shifted from Qiandongnan to Qiannan, with a total distance of 54.1 km. Thus, the following conclusions were drawn: (1) benefiting from the effective implementation of forestry-related policies, the forest biomass had significant increased in a long time series, especially for the artificial shelter forest; (2) the gravity center shifted to the northwest and the number of level 1 forest biomass hot spots increased year by year, which showed a generalized symmetric pattern along the Wujiang River mainstream; and (3) the results of geographical survey showed that the change of forest biomass was greatly affected by topography, climate and human activities, among which terrain factors had the greatest impact.