Oil palm plantations degrade aboveground carbon stocks and associated ecosystem characteristics in remaining forests
Abstract
Oil palm is a major driver of deforestation in the tropics. Planted area expanded from 6 to 16 million hectares between 1990 and 2010, increasing by 150% in Malaysia. Despite widespread conversion of tropical forests to oil palm and other commodity crops, roughly 1.2 billion ha of tropical forest remain. We are only beginning to understand the effects of widespread forest conversion on ecosystem processes in remaining forests. Using high fidelity imaging spectroscopy and LiDAR data, we mapped and quantified changes in forest structure and foliar characteristics related to aboveground carbon, growth strategies, and turnover along the edge of oil palm plantations in Sabah, Malaysia. We found average declines in aboveground carbon density of approximately 25% along forest edges that extended 115 m into the forest interior. Carbon stock declines were evident within the first few years of edge creation, although the magnitude of change varied substantially in the first 20 years following the establishment of an edge. Forests adjacent to edges ranging from 20-40 years old exhibited carbon stocks consistently 20-32% lower than forest interiors. Our results also provide evidence of changes in foliar nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations, leaf mass per area, and gap dynamics that permeate into remnant forests along oil palm plantation edges. However, results suggest that compositionally different forests vary in their sensitivity to anthropogenic edge effects. These findings have major implications considering an estimated 20% of all remaining tropical forests lie with 100 m of a forest edge.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMGC12C..07O
- Keywords:
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- 1616 Climate variability;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1622 Earth system modeling;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1988 Temporal analysis and representation;
- INFORMATICS