Diverse Forests Store More Carbon Than Monocultures

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https://eos.org/articles/diverse-forests-store-more-carbon-than-monocultures

By Saima May Sidik, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: It pays to mix it up—planted forests containing more than one tree species can store several times as much carbon as monocultures, as shown in a meta-analysis published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. Researchers have long known that biodiversity increases forest productivity, ....Forestry companies often plant monocultures, so the study has the potential to affect industry practices. ...Researchers sifted through more than 11,300 studies, including some from a worldwide network of tree diversity experiments called TreeDivNet, to find 18 that included the information necessary to compare carbon storage in monocultures with that in stands containing two or more species of trees. ...Stands with two or more species contained at least 25% more aboveground carbon than the best-performing monocultures, .... When the researchers focused on forests containing four species, the effect became more striking. These mixed stands had more than 4 times as much carbon as the average monoculture and more than twice as much carbon as the best-performing monocultures…. 

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