Responses of the Carbon Storage and Sequestration Potential of Forest Vegetation to Temperature Increases in Yunnan Province, SW China

Ruiwu Zhou,Yanqiang Jin,Chongyun Wang,Qinghai Song,Mingchun Peng,Wangjun Li,John Grace,Yuntong Liu,Youxing Lin,Yiping Zhang,Xuehai Fei,Jinbo Gao,Shusen Wang,Liqing Sha

doi:10.3390/f9050227

Abstract

The distribution of forest vegetation and forest carbon sequestration potential are significantly influenced by climate change. In this study, a map of the current distribution of vegetation in Yunnan Province was compiled based on data from remote sensing imagery from the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) from 2008 to 2011. A classification and regression tree (CART) model was used to predict the potential distribution of the main forest vegetation types in Yunnan Province and estimate the changes in carbon storage and carbon sequestration potential (CSP) in response to increasing temperature. The results show that the current total forest area in Yunnan Province is 1.86 × 107 ha and that forest covers 48.63% of the area. As the temperature increases, the area of forest distribution first increases and then decreases, and it decreases by 11% when the temperature increases from 1.5 to 2 °C. The mean carbon density of the seven types of forest vegetation in Yunnan Province is 84.69 Mg/ha. The total carbon storage of the current forest vegetation in Yunnan Province is 871.14 TgC, and the CSP is 1100.61 TgC. The largest CSP (1114.82 TgC) occurs when the temperature increases by 0.5 °C. Incremental warming of 2 °C will sharply decrease the forest CSP, especially in those regions with mature coniferous forest vegetation. Semi-humid evergreen broad-leaved forests were highly sensitive to temperature changes, and the CSP of these forests will decrease with increasing temperature. Warm-hot coniferous forests have the greatest CSP in all simulation scenarios except the scenario of a 2 °C temperature increase. These results indicate that temperature increases can influence the CSP in Yunnan Province, and the largest impact emerged in the 2 °C increase scenario.

Highlights

Forest vegetation is a major terrestrial ecosystem and can provide low-cost options to mitigate climate change
TMW was an overwhelmingly potent factor among the six climate variables, indicating that extremely cold temperatures in a year play a decisive role in the broad-scale distribution of the forest vegetation in Yunnan Province
Future vegetation distributions were predicted by the classification and regression tree (CART) model under a rising temperature scenario, the present carbon density values were used to calculate the future carbon storage in Yunnan Province in this study

Summary

Introduction

Forest vegetation is a major terrestrial ecosystem and can provide low-cost options to mitigate climate change. Studies have explored the carbon storage and sequestration potential of forest vegetation in China with different models. Some used the data from the forest resource inventory to predict the forest vegetation carbon storage from 2005 to 2050 with a stage-classified matrix model [7]. These approaches cannot be used to predict future whole-forest CSP, especially under climate change. Some studies have explored the carbon storage and carbon sequestration in Yunnan Province [9,10,11] Those studies have assumed that all forests are mature, and they have not considered the succession and distribution changes of forest vegetation. Climate change causes high uncertainty, which is a key factor that regulates carbon sequestration in a forest

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