1. Effects of national ecological restoration projects on carbon sequestration in China from 2001 to 2010.
- Author
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Fei Lu, Huifeng Hu, Wenjuan Sun, Jiaojun Zhu, Guobin Liu, Wangming Zhou, Quanfa Zhang, Peili Shi, Xiuping Liu, Xing Wu, Lu Zhang, Xiaohua Wei, Limin Dai, Kerong Zhang, Yirong Sun, Sha Xue, Wanjun Zhang, Dingpeng Xiong, Lei Deng, and Bojie Liu
- Subjects
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RESTORATION ecology , *CARBON sequestration , *FORESTS & forestry , *GRASSLANDS , *CLIMATE change mitigation - Abstract
The long-term stressful utilization of forests and grasslands has led to ecosystem degradation and C loss. Since the late 1970s China has launched six key national ecological restoration projects to protect its environment and restore degraded ecosystems. Here, we conducted a large-scale field investigation and a literature survey of biomass and soil C in China's forest, shrubland, and grassland ecosystems across the regions where the six projects were implemented (~16% of the country's land area). We investigated the changes in the C stocks of these ecosystems to evaluate the contributions of the projects to the country's C sink between 2001 and 2010. Over this decade, we estimated that the total annual C sink in the project region was 132 Tg C per y (1 Tg = 1012 g), over half of which (74 Tg C per y, 56%) was attributed to the implementation of the projects. Our results demonstrate that these restoration projects have substantially contributed to CO2 mitigation in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
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