Nutrient sustainability for Swedish forests

Abstract

The work with critical loads for acid deposition, created the expression ”critical uptake” as a term to be used in the calculation of nitrogen critical loads (Sverdrup et al. 1990; Warfvinge and Sverdrup 1992, Sverdrup and Rosen 1998). These ”critical uptakes” are expressions of how much the forest can take up without depleting the soil. If the critical uptake is adjusted to management and inverted, the sustainable harvest can be estimated. Thus we can address if the forest at present runs a profit or a deficit with respect to base cations, but we can also ask the question of how much wood can we produce with the base cation supply available ? This is what we will do in the following.