Modelling Tree Growth in Monospecific Forests from Forest Inventory Data

Guadalupe Sáez-Cano,Paloma Ruiz-Benito,Miguel A Zavala,Marcos Marvá

doi:10.3390/f12060753

Abstract

The prediction of tree growth is key to further understand the carbon sink role of forests and the short-term forest capacity on climate change mitigation. In this work, we used large-scale data available from three consecutive forest inventories in a Euro-Mediterranean region and the Bertalanffy–Chapman–Richards equation to model up to a decade’s tree size variation in monospecific forests in the growing stages. We showed that a tree-level fitting with ordinary differential equations can be used to forecast tree diameter growth across time and space as function of environmental characteristics and initial size. This modelling approximation was applied at different aggregation levels to monospecific regions with forest inventories to predict trends in aboveground tree biomass stocks. Furthermore, we showed that this model accurately forecasts tree growth temporal dynamics as a function of size and environmental conditions. Further research to provide longer term prediction forest stock dynamics in a wide variety of forests should model regeneration and mortality processes and biotic interactions.

Highlights

Forests play a key role in the carbon balance worldwide and harbour more than 2/3 of terrestrial biodiversity [1,2,3]
The explicit solution of this equation has been used for this purpose both worldwide [28] and in Spanish forests [29], alone or within the so-called generalized algebraic difference approach [30], we showed that, using the BCR ordinary differential equation, three censuses are an adequate approximation for modelling short-term forest stocks’ dynamics
We considered the species Pinus sylvestris (Psy), Pinus halepensis (Pha), Pinus nigra (Pni), and Quercus ilex (Qil), the most abundant species in the province of Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain)

Summary

Introduction

Forests play a key role in the carbon balance worldwide and harbour more than 2/3 of terrestrial biodiversity [1,2,3]. The role of forests in climate regulation is being increasingly recognized by the scientific community and international policies, since the Kyoto Protocol in. Land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) activities are aiming to further increase the carbon stored in tree biomass, where forest management within forests is critical to maintain, monitor, and predict the role of forests in climate mitigation. Forests have the potential to provide a key and complementary role in both absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide and conserving biodiversity (e.g., [6,7]). Proper accounting and prospective scenarios of carbon storage by forests are needed in order to implement specific actions and accomplish mitigation targets

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