CONFLICT – Can Continuous Cover Forestry Lead to Increased Carbon uptake of Terrestrial ecosystems?

Forests sequester carbon (C) in biomass and soil and deliver renewable energy and material. But which silviculture is most beneficial for the climate?

A controversial question!Today more than 80% of the Swedish forest is managed by clearcutting (CF), with C losses during the clearcut phase.Is the C uptake larger in a continuous cover (CCF) forest, or is the growth too low there?

There are no enlightening measurements, because it is hard to find suitable CCF forests and demanding to quantify the C budget of CF forests for entire rotation periods.

Now we can finally start filling that knowledge-gap.In a suitable, well-documented CCF forest with long history we will measure CO2 exchange with the atmosphere by eddy-covariance continuously for at least 4-years. This will show how much carbon a CCF forest absorbs and what controls the uptake. We even plan a selective harvest to study its impact on the C balance.

Combined with stand history we will get long-term estimates of growth, harvest and C uptake.There are no measurements of the rotation-period C budget for CF forests either. But with chronosequence data we can describe its dynamics.

Furthermore, growth and yield are available from harvest data This enables comparison of the long-term C balance with CCF forestry.We will analyze soil C and measure soil respiration by chambers in both forest types to study C allocation and components of the C balance.Our results will provide a solid ground for important guidelines in forestry.