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Attributing the impacts of ecological engineering and climate change on carbon uptake in Northeastern China

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Abstract

Context

In the past decades, several ecological engineering (eco-engineering) programs have been conducted in China, leading to a significant increase in regional carbon sink. However, the contribution of different eco-engineering programs to carbon uptake is still not clear, as the location of different programs is difficult to identify, and their impacts are concurrent with climate change.

Objectives

We aim to detect the location of eco-engineering programs and attribute the impacts of eco-engineering and climate change on vegetation dynamics and carbon uptake in Northeastern China during 2000–2020.

Methods

We developed a new framework to detect the location of eco-engineering programs by combining a temporal pattern analysis method and Markov model, and to attribute the impacts of eco-engineering and climate change on vegetation greenness and carbon uptake by combining a neighbor contrast method within a sliding window and trend analysis on the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and gross primary production (GPP).

Results

We identified four main forestry eco-engineering programs: croplands to forest (CtoF), grasslands to forest (GtoF), savannas to forest (StoF), and natural forest conservation (NFC) programs, whose areas accounted for 2.11%, 1.89%, 3.41%, and 1.72% of the total study area, respectively. Both eco-engineering and climate change contributed to the increase in greenness and carbon uptake. Compared to climate change effect, eco-engineering increased NDVI and GPP by 121% and 21.43% on average, respectively. Specifically, the eco-engineering-induced increases in GPP were 54.1%, 9.46%, 8.13%, and 24.20% for CtoF, GtoF, StoF, and NFC, respectively.

Conclusions

These findings highlight the important and direct contribution of eco-engineering on vegetation greening with positive effects on carbon sequestration at a fine scale, providing an important implication for eco-engineering planning and management towards a carbon-neutral future.

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Acknowledgements

The work was supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFF1300501) and Major Program of Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IAEMP202201). MW is supported by the Swedish National Space Agency (SNSA) under Grant Dnr 2021-00111.

Funding

The work was supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2022YFF1300501) and Major Program of Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. IAEMP202201), and Swedish National Space Agency (Grant No. 2021-00111).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CAS Key Laboratory of Forest Ecology and Management, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110016, China

    Huidong Li, Wanjing Gao & Yage Liu

  2. College of Resources and Environment, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Wanjing Gao

  3. Department of Soil, Water, and Climate, University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, MN, USA

    Fenghui Yuan

  4. Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University, 22100, Lund, Sweden

    Minchao Wu

  5. Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, 75105, Uppsala, Sweden

    Minchao Wu

  6. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, 37240, USA

    Lin Meng

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Contributions

HL wrote the main manuscript text, did the statistical analysis, and prepared Figs. 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. WG and YL prepared the data and Fig. 2 and wrote parts of the “Introduction” and “Methods” sections. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Huidong Li.

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Li, H., Gao, W., Liu, Y. et al. Attributing the impacts of ecological engineering and climate change on carbon uptake in Northeastern China. Landsc Ecol 38, 3945–3960 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-023-01679-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-023-01679-x

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