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Effects of land use planning on aboveground vegetation biomass in China

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Abstract

Dramatic land use change is expected to take place in China in the coming decades, which will exert great impact on the vegetation biomass. The paper assesses how land use change will influence the size and spatial distribution of the vegetation biomass in China. A spatially explicit land use change model, Dyna-CLUE, is employed together with a biomass density approach to account for the effects of forest age on biomass change. Two scenarios have been developed. The first is a trend scenario where land use trends during the period 1985–1995 are extrapolated, representing the situation before implementing the national ecological restoration program. The second is a planning scenario which takes into consideration a range of land use planning measures. Possible temporal and spatial distribution of land use and vegetation biomass across China was simulated. The results indicate that under the planning scenario, vegetation biomass would be 15.47 Gt in 2030, showing an increase by 0.11 Gt compared to that in 2005. Under the trend scenario, however, the biomass would be 14.62 Gt in 2030, 0.02 Gt higher than that in 2005 due to the forest devastation and forest age effect. Seeming to be relatively trivial, the differences between the scenarios are huge in absolute terms, illustrating the impact of land use planning on biomass variation. Compared with the trend scenario, the area of planted forests under the planning scenario will be larger and biomass density lower. Thus under the planning scenario, the vegetation biomass will be more likely to increase, acting as a carbon sink in the future.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by China National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (40825003), by National Basic Research Priorities Program (2010CB950904) of Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China, and by National Natural Science Foundation of China (41301185).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Qufu Normal University, Rizhao, 276826, China

    Xiaofang Sun & Meng Wang

  2. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Tianxiang Yue & Zemeng Fan

  3. Beijing, china

    Fengqiao Liu

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  1. Xiaofang Sun
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Correspondence to Xiaofang Sun.

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Sun, X., Yue, T., Wang, M. et al. Effects of land use planning on aboveground vegetation biomass in China. Environ Earth Sci 73, 6553–6564 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-014-3875-4

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