Mitigating the Effects of Climate Change through Harvesting and Planting in Boreal Forests of Northeastern China

Abstract

The ecological resilience of boreal forests is an important element of measuring forest ecosystem capacity recovered from a disturbance, and is sensitive to broad-scale factors (e.g., climate change, fire disturbance and human related impacts). Therefore, quantifying the effects of these factors is increasingly important for forest ecosystem management. In this study, we investigated the impacts of climate change, climate-induced fire regimes, and forest management schemes on forest ecological resilience using a forest landscape model in the boreal forests of the Great Xing’an Mountains, Northeastern China. First, we simulated the effects of the three studied variables on forest aboveground biomass, growing space occupied, age cohort structure, and the proportion of mid and late-seral species indicators by using the LANDIS PRO model. Second, we calculated ecological resilience based on these four selected indicators. We designed five simulated scenarios: Current fire only scenario, increased fire occurrence only scenario, climate change only scenario, climate-induced fire regime scenario, and climate-fire-management scenario. We analyzed ecological resilience over the five scenarios from 2000 to 2300. The results indicated that the initialized stand density and basal area information from the year 2000 adequately represented the real forest landscape of that year, and no significant difference was found between the simulated landscape of year 2010 and the forest inventory data of that year at the landscape scale. The simulated fire disturbance results were consistent with field inventory data in burned areas. Compared to the current fire regime scenario, forests where fire occurrence increased by 30% had an increase in ecological resilience of 12.4–43.2% at the landscape scale, whereas increasing fire occurrence by 200% would decrease the ecological resilience by 2.5–34.3% in all simulated periods. Under the low climate-induced fire regime scenario, the ecological resilience was 12.3–26.7% higher than that in the reference scenario across all simulated periods. Under the high climate-induced fire regime scenario, the ecological resilience decreased significantly by 30.3% and 53.1% in the short- and medium-terms at landscape scale, while increasing slightly by 3.8% in the long-term period compared to the reference scenario. Compared to no forest management scenario, ecological resilience was decreased by 5.8–32.4% under all harvesting and planting strategies for the low climate-induced fire regime scenario, and only the medium and high planting intensity scenarios visibly increased the ecological resilience (1.7–15.8%) under the high climate-induced fire regime scenario at the landscape scale. Results from our research provided insight into the future forest management and have implications for improving boreal forest sustainability.