AI Article Synopsis
- Understanding how forests store carbon is essential for effective climate change solutions.
- Analysis of 892 Atlantic Forest inventories reveals that factors like forest disturbance history and tree community characteristics are more significant for carbon storage than traditional environmental drivers like climate and soil.
- The study emphasizes that preventing forest degradation is crucial for maintaining carbon stocks and warns that focusing solely on carbon in conservation policies may overlook the need to protect biodiversity.
Article Abstract
Understanding the mechanisms controlling forest carbon storage is crucial to support "nature-based" solutions for climate change mitigation. We used a dataset of 892 Atlantic Forest inventories to assess the direct and indirect effects of environmental conditions, human impacts, tree community proprieties, and sampling methods on tree above-ground carbon stocks. We showed that the widely accepted drivers of carbon stocks, such as climate, soil, topography, and forest fragmentation, have a much smaller role than the forest disturbance history and functional proprieties of the Atlantic Forest. Specifically, within-forest disturbance level was the most important driver, with effect at least 30% higher than any of the environmental conditions individually. Thus, our findings suggest that the conservation of tropical carbon stocks may be dependable on, principally, avoiding forest degradation and that conservation policies focusing only on carbon may fail to protect tropical biodiversity.
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Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9205592 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abl7968 | DOI Listing |
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