Sapling recruitment as an indicator of carbon resiliency in forests of the northern USA.

ABSTRACT: Tree regeneration shapes forest carbon dynamics by determining long-term forest composition and structure, which suggests that threats to natural regeneration may diminish the capacity of forests to replace live tree carbon transferred to the atmosphere or other pools through tree mortality. Yet, the potential implications of tree regeneration patterns for future carbon dynamics have been sparsely studied. We used forest inventory plots to investigate whether the composition of existing tree regeneration is consistent with aboveground carbon stock loss, replacement, or gain for forests across the northeastern and midwestern USA, leveraging a recently developed method to predict the likelihood of sapling recruitment from seedling abundance tallied within six seedling height classes. A compa

SUBMITTER: Harris LB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11304899 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature