Carbon Management for Mitigating Climatic Warming

Under even-aged management, varying management measures and harvest intensities are used for maintaining/enhancing the potentials of carbon sequestration in boreal forest ecosystems. At the stand/patch scale, carbon sequestration under even-aged management varies substantially depending on the species and age structure between tree stands. Regarding management and harvest, growth and development of tree stands in separate sites with varying site fertility involve the gradual replacement of one population/community of trees by other ones through a chronosequence. Similar replacement further occurs in the ground vegetation, with the replacement of grass- and herb-rich vegetation by the dominance of dwarf shrubs and mosses through the maturation of dominating trees. Combined with management and harvest, this successional development increases the complexity of habitats and diversity of organisms in forest ecosystems. This contributes to carbon sequestration from the scale of individual stands to the whole forest landscape. Under uneven-aged management, the production involves the selection interval and lifespan of different tree species at the individual-tree scale, contributing to the structural complexity of density and size of trees from the dominance of seedlings and young trees to limited density of mature trees.