Quantifying Tree and Soil Carbon Stocks in a Temperate Urban Forest in Northeast China

Forests

卷:7

Lu Xiao¹  Bo Zhang¹  Hailiang Lv²  Wenjie Wang²  Xingyuan He²  Wei Zhou² 

[1] Key Laboratory of Forest Plant Ecology, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China;

[2] Northeast Institute of Geography and Agricultural Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130102, China;

关键词: carbon storage;    SOC density;    urban-rural gradients;    soil carbon;    Harbin;   

DOI  :  10.3390/f7090200

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Society has placed greater focus on the ecological service of urban forests; however, more information is required on the variation of carbon (C) in trees and soils in different functional forest types, administrative districts, and urban-rural gradients. To address this issue, we measured various tree and soil parameters by sampling 219 plots in the urban forest of the Harbin city region. Averaged tree and soil C stock density (C stocks per unit tree cover) for Harbin city were 7.71 (±7.69) kg C·m−2 and 5.48 (±2.86) kg C·m−2, respectively. They were higher than those of other Chinese cities (Shenyang and Changchun), but were much lower than local natural forests. The tree C stock densities varied 2.3- to 3.2-fold among forest types, administrative districts, and ring road-based urban-rural gradients. In comparison, soil organic C (SOC) densities varied by much less (1.4–1.5-fold). We found these to be urbanization-dependent processes, which were closely related to the urban-rural gradient data based on ring-roads and settlement history patterns. We estimated that SOC accumulation during the 100-year urbanization of Harbin was very large (5 to 14 thousand tons), accounting for over one quarter of the stored C in trees. Our results provide new insights into the dynamics of above- and below-ground C (especially in soil) during the urbanization process, and that a city’s ability to provide C-related ecosystem services increases as it ages. Our findings highlight that urbanization effects should be incorporated into calculations of soil C budgets in regions subject to rapid urban expansion, such as China.

【 授权许可】

Unknown