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Dynamics of ecosystem services provided by subtropical forests in Southeast China during succession as measured by donor and receiver value
Citation:
Lu, H., E. Campbell, Daniel E. Campbell, C. Wang, AND H. Ren. Dynamics of ecosystem services provided by subtropical forests in Southeast China during succession as measured by donor and receiver value. Ecosystem Services. Elsevier Online, New York, NY, 23:248-258, (2017).
Impact/Purpose:
This paper is significant because it examines the dynamics of the provision of ecosystem services by forests over a succession series that spans 400 years. The paper also examines the rate of increase of services during forest restoration over a period of 23 years. The emergy used in ecosystem services provision is compared to the provision of similar services by economic means in the Chinese economy. The better understanding of the temporal aspects of ecosystem services provision from forests is a significant outcome of the study. Emergy is the only common denominator for evaluating environment, economy, and society is energy or more specifically available energy, which has the potential to do work. Furthermore, available energy alone is not sufficient to provide an accurate evaluation, because energies of different kinds have different potentials to do work. A simple example of quality differences in work can be seen in human labor, where a brain surgeon and a ditch digger expend the same joule of metabolic work with very different outcomes, that is the quality of the work done is different based on the knowledge and experience of the human performing the labor. This same principle applies to all actions performed in a system and can be generalized through accounting for actions in terms of the emergy required to perform them. For, business, government, and institutions, emergy accounting provides a new perspective on value that can be used in decision-making. It goes beyond economic value and its extension as ecosystems services, which are subjective in nature, to provide a comprehensive objective measure of worth for the comparison of alternatives and as in this paper, it provides a check on the reasonableness of economic evaluations of ecosystems services.
Description:
The trends in the provision of ecosystem services during restoration and succession of subtropical forests and plantations were quantified, in terms of both receiver and donor values, based on a case study of a 3-step secondary succession series that included a 400-year-old subtropical forest and a 23-year history of growth on 3 subtropical forest plantations in Southeastern China. The ‘People's Republic of China Forestry Standard: Forest Ecosystem Service Valuation Norms’ was revised and applied to quantify the receiver values of ecosystem services, which were then compared with the emergy-based, donor values of the services. The results revealed that the efficiencies of subtropical forests and plantations in providing ecosystem services were 2 orders of magnitude higher than similar services provided by the current China economic system, and these efficiencieskept increasing over the course of succession. As a result, we conclude that afforestation is an efficient way to accelerate both the ability and efficiency of subtropical forests to provide ecosystem services.
