PKU College of Urban and Environmental Sciences find natural forests outperform plantations environmentally, not economically
Mar 24, 2022
Peking University, March 24, 2022: On March 18, 2022, an international interdisciplinary research team led by researcher Hua Fangyuan from the Ecological Research Center of PKU College of Urban and Environmental Sciences published a research paper The Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Contributions and Trade-offs of Forest Restoration Approaches in Science.
The study summarized and analyzed nearly 25,950 matched data pairs from 264 studies in 53 countries, and found that compared with plantation forests with simple structures, natural forests can better support biodiversity conservation and realize ecosystem services such as surface carbon storage, soil conservation, and water conservation. plantation forests, on the other hand, exhibit advantages in wood production.
Natural forest and plantation landscape (photo credited to Hua Fangyuan)
Forest restoration is widely implemented as an important nature-based climate solution worldwide. But one underlying problem is that the dominance of the above-mentioned ecosystem services in forest restoration may actually crowd out the benefit space of biodiversity.
"Given the current biodiversity crisis and its urgent need for forest restoration, this crowding out has missed a huge opportunity for biodiversity conservation," Hua said.
The hypothesis that "plantations and natural forests can produce equally effective ecosystem services" has yet to be experimentally validated. To fill this gap, Hua Fangyuan's research integrates existing evidence and compares the effectiveness of a series of plantations and natural forests in four key ecosystem services and biodiversity, namely, surface carbon storage, soil conservation, water conservation, and wood production. The findings look to provide empirical and scientific support for establishing forest restoration policies.
Assessment of plantations compared to natural forests
The research is the first one in history to construct and analyze the most comprehensive paired data set of plantations and natural forest from the perspective of multiple benefits.
Hua Fangyuan and his colleagues found that, when compared to natural forests, many old or abandoned plantations around the world have lower biodiversity, surface carbon storage, soil conservation, and water conservation. Considering the universality of such plantations, restoring them to natural forests will bring great ecological benefits.
The findings have important implications for forest restoration policies. The United Nation has decade designated the decade 2021-2030 as the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. Together with other efforts to address climate change, the decade will drive global forest restoration across millions of hectares, with the potential to bring about significant ecological and social benefits.
Hua Fangyuan is the first author and co-corresponding author of the research paper, and Wang Wei and Miao Xinran, members of the team, are co-authors. The research was funded by the PKU Ecological Research Center, the Strategic Pioneer Science and Technology Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Newton Fund of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, and the São Paulo Fund of Brazil. The team’s other members come from 10 prestigious research institutions in seven different countries across Europe, Australia and South America.
Related Links:
The biodiversity and ecosystem service contributions and trade-offs of forest restoration approaches (science.org)
Forest restoration: trade-offs between environmental and wood production goals | University of Cambridge
Written by: QIU Kanghua
Edited by: Ye Yimeng
Source: PKU News (Chinese)
