Abstract
Landscape management is increasingly focused on trade-offs among various ecosystem services. For example, while clearing forests may produce timber and provide land for agriculture, it also releases significant amounts of carbon to the atmosphere, influencing the global climate system. Evaluating the tradeoffs among ecosystem services is made difficult by the inherent heterogeneity of social–ecological systems at many levels of ecological (and social) organization. For example, the provisioning of ecosystem services may change with the size of organisms, the species composition of communities, and with variation in landscape pattern through time. In this chapter, we introduce common methods for estimating the amount of carbon stored in forests and explore the implications of spatial and temporal heterogeneity for carbon management at the landscape level. Assuming little prior knowledge of these issues, these exercises will enable students to.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank two reviewers for their comments on earlier versions. Data from the BCI forest dynamics research project was made possible by National Science Foundation grants to Stephen P. Hubbell: DEB-0640386, DEB-0425651, DEB-0346488, DEB-0129874, DEB-00753102, DEB-9909347, DEB-9615226, DEB-9615226, DEB-9405933, DEB-9221033, DEB-9100058, DEB-8906869, DEB-8605042, DEB-8206992, DEB-7922197, support from the Center for Tropical Forest Science, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Small World Institute Fund, and numerous private individuals, and through the hard work of over 100 people from 10 countries over the past two decades. The plot project is part the Center for Tropical Forest Science, a global network of large-scale demographic tree plots.
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Kirby, K.R., Rhemtulla, J.M., Gergel, S.E. (2017). Heterogeneity in Ecosystem Services: Multi-Scale Carbon Management in Tropical Forest Landscapes. In: Gergel, S., Turner, M. (eds) Learning Landscape Ecology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6374-4_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6374-4_17
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