Abstract
Forest trees exhibit a large variation in the basal area increment (BAI), and the variation is attributed to the stand density, biodiversity, and stand spatial structure. Studying and quantifying the effect of these above variables on tree growth is vital for future forest management. However, the stand spatial structure based on neighboring trees has rarely been considered, especially in the mixed forests. This study adopted the random-forest (RF) algorithm to model and interpret BAI based on stand density, biodiversity, and spatial structure. Fourteen independent variables, including two stand density predictors, four biodiversity predictors, and eight spatial structure predictors, were evaluated. The RF model was trained for the whole stand, three tree species groups (gap, neutral, and shade_tolerant), and two tree species (spruce and fir). A 10-fold blocked cross-validation was then used to optimize the hyper-parameters and evaluate the models. The squared correlation coefficients (R2) for the six groups were 0.233 for the whole stand, 0.575 for fir, 0.609 for shade_tolerant, 0.622 for neutral, 0.722 for gap, and 0.730 for spruce. The Stand Density Index (SDI) was the most-important predictor, suggesting that BAI is primarily restricted by competition. BAI and species biodiversity were positively correlated for the whole stand. The stands were expected to be randomly distributed based on the relationship between the uniform angle index (W) and growth. The relationship between dominance (U) and BAI indicated that small trees should be planted around the light-demanding tree species and vice versa. Of note, these findings emphasize the need to consider the three types of variables in mixed forests, especially the spatial structure factors. This study may help make significant advances in species composition, spatial arrangement, and the sustainable development of mixed forests.
Highlights
Understanding forest growth is crucial for forest management and the estimations of net primary production and carbon sequestration [1]
Our study proves that the light-demanding tree species has a large Basal area growth increment (BAI) in the open, and the shade-tolerant tree species has a large BAI when the canopy is covered from the perspective of spatial-structure parameters
This study presented a random-forest model for BAI estimation, which can effectively identify the relationship between stand density, biodiversity, and spatial structure on growth
Summary
Understanding forest growth is crucial for forest management and the estimations of net primary production and carbon sequestration [1]. Forests with mixed species have higher productivity, higher temporal stability, a lower risk of biotic and abiotic disturbances, and a more diverse ecosystem. Basal area growth increment (BAI) is suitable for modelling tree growth among the other measurements because it is directly related to the diameter at breast height (DBH), making it more reliable [3,4]. Machinelearning algorithms have already been used in forest management, providing more accurate predictions than the traditional linear regressions in dendroclimatology [5,6,7,8,9]. Martin Jung used BAI modelling of spruce and fir in random forests [10]
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