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Species-rich forests store twice as much carbon as monocultures

In 2009, BEF-China began as a unique forest biodiversity experiment in collaboration between institutions in China, Germany and Switzerland. The large-scale project investigated the importance of tree species richness for the good functioning of forest ecosystems. Stands of trees comprising different numbers of species were planted -- from monocultures to highly species-rich plots with 16 different tree species on an area of 670 square meter.

After eight years, such species-rich forest plots stored an average of 32 tons of carbon per hectare in aboveground biomass. By contrast, monocultures averaged only 12 tons of carbon per hectare -- less than half as much. During photosynthesis, the plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert the carbon to biomass. When a forest stores more carbon, this helps reduce greenhouse gases and at the same time also indicates high forest productivity.

The fact that biodiversity increases productivity had previously been demonstrated through experiments in grassland ecosystems in Europe and the USA. By contrast, since it was assumed that all tree species occupy similar ecological niches, a minimal effect of biodiversity was conjectured for forests. Evidently, however, this assumption was wrong. "In the forest biodiversity experiment, biomass increased just as quickly with species richness as it did in the meadow ecosystems. As a result, even after just four years, there were clear differences between the monocultures and the species-rich forests," explains Prof. Helge Bruelheide of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, co-director of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), which together with the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Adacemy of Sciences oversaw the field experiments. These differences grew continuously over further four years.

Impacts of species richness on productivity in a large-scale subtropical forest experiment. Science, 2018; 362 (6410): 80 DOI: 10.1126/science.aat6405

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