Forest carbon uptake in North America’s aging temperate deciduous forests: A data-theory-model mismatch?

Abstract:

Century-old temperate deciduous forests in the US upper Midwest and Northeast power much of North America’s terrestrial carbon sink, but these forests’ carbon uptake capacity is expected to soon decline. But will this really happen? We marshal empirical data and ecological theory to show that declines in carbon uptake are not imminent in regrown temperate deciduous forests during coming decades, despite long-held assumptions and modeling results that predict declining carbon uptake during middle stages of ecosystem development. Age and production data for temperate deciduous forests, synthesized from published literature, do not provide evidence for declining net primary and ecosystem production (NPP and NEP, respectively) within the age-range most regional forests will occupy over the next half-century. Ecological theory suggests a mechanism for sustained carbon uptake in the region’s aging forests in which high-frequency, low-severity disturbances maintain NPP and NEP by increasing ecosystem complexity. This theoretical model is supported by observations from the Forest Accelerated Succession Experiment in Michigan, USA, but such mechanisms sustaining production in old forests are not broadly represented in ecosystem models. Ecosystems experiencing low-frequency, high-severity disturbances that simplify ecosystem complexity do exhibit declining production during middle stages of succession, but we suggest that such scenarios have exerted a disproportionate influence on prevailing modeling and ecological assumptions regarding age-related declines in forest production. We conclude that there is wide ecological space for forests to sustain high rates of carbon uptake during middle stages of ecosystem development, and that advancing mechanistic understanding of long-term forest carbon cycle dynamics is essential to modeling the continent’s future carbon sink strength.